


to soothe all the sea to rest

by artemihs



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Bisexual Eivor, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Childhood Friends, Eventual Romance, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up Together, Historical Accuracy, Old Norse/Viking Culture, Pining, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Ubisoft really gave us two long-lost childhood BFFs with so much potential and did them dirty, Vili is sentimental af, featuring every longship backstory and scrap ubi gave us
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28639326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artemihs/pseuds/artemihs
Summary: Little echoes, little glimpses of the past like still-glowing embers in the dark. The scent of smoke and the sea. Fire-light dancing in bright blue eyes. The bloodbeat of the war drums and ritual chant ringing battle-lust and sword-song in his ears. A yearning, buried deep, for an old equilibrium in the absent space at his side.Memories that will come as if in a dream, in those hushed nights lying under woolen tents in the battle encampments of East Anglia or abandoned farmlands of Mercia, during the cold and soggy marches across Northumbria as the Great Army razes a bloody path through England’s fractured kingdoms.In time, these are the seeds from which a long dormant wish sprouts full-throated into a desire that haunts him in the shape of a single question:What if?
Relationships: Eivor/Vili Hemmingson
Comments: 56
Kudos: 133





	1. áðr

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [das Meer zur Ruhe bringen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29797428) by [izzbree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/izzbree/pseuds/izzbree)



The _skalds_ , when they spin the deeds of war into verse and death into glory, tell stories of battles that are blood-feasts, that begin with shields beating and sliding against each other in the shield wall, the storming of swords and spears and men’s cries as axes and arrows fly, the smells of the burning cauldrons of oil and pitch that are thrown from the ramparts, that scorch and eat wood and flesh alike, and the blades singing through the dust and chaos of it all a terrible, thrilling death song.

Every Norse child who will become a warrior comes to know this song as sure as they know the curve and weight of their first axe. With time, they revere it. There is no need to drink a berserker's brew to feel and embrace the bloodlust that comes with bestowing a glorious death, the adrenaline that flows like ichor through every muscle it takes to lodge an axe or spear perfectly in the enemy’s heart or skull; all it takes is their first battle to name the feeling. The thrill of being alive, the feeling of _rightness_ , of what came easy and natural. _With Odin’s blessing, the battle-grace of Freyja and Thor’s own might._ For it was the feeling of the gods fighting with you.

*

The first time Vili meets Eivor Varinsdóttir, they are both somewhere they aren’t supposed to be. The sounds and smells of Yule feasting from the main hall remind him that he should be by his father’s side at the head table, where the nobles from their allied clans across Rygjafylke are gathered. Instead, he is alone in the armory in the back of the longhouse, bent over some swords and axes he has laid out on the ground. 

At eleven winters old, he isn’t old enough to train as a warrior yet – all children must wait until they are at least thirteen winters to formally begin in the barracks – and he is unaccustomed to the weight and balance of the weapons he holds in his hands, but that doesn’t stop him from play-fighting numerous worthy foes: the raiders he imagines are from the bordering lands of Agðir, where Kjotve the Cruel rules, or the legendary beasts said to roam the mountaintops of Norway. _One day I will be able to meet them all in glorious battle_ , he thinks while feigning a thrust with an old seaxe in one hand and plunging a longsword straight through the bowels of an imaginary raider with the other. 

He freezes mid-spin at the sound of distant footsteps, just for a breath, then hurriedly stashes the weapons away on the racks and bolts from the room before Trygve can spot him. He climbs up a trellis braided with Yule garlands up to the rafters, onto the upper loft where he crouches quiet and still behind some old chests.

“Vili?” he hears Trygve call out. “I know you were just in here, playing with the weapons again. Come now, your father wants you to join everyone at the feast.”

Vili stays silent, because giving himself up now would mean admitting that he _was_ just there in the armory. All those times he thought Trygve and his father had never noticed him sneaking out of bed or from lessons…

Trgyve is saying something else, but he isn’t paying attention because another moving shape has caught his eye, climbing up to the rafters on the other side of the hall, a fur cloak around their shoulders. Small, lithe, and as clearly comfortable climbing around longhouses as he is. The figure disappears through a light shaft leading out onto the longhouse roof, and, piqued with interest, Vili makes up his mind to follow them.

He waits until Trygve gives an exasperated sigh and leaves to go back to the feasting hall before climbing down and darting up to the loft on the other side, pulling out some furs from a storage chest and wrapping them around himself before he carefully steps out of the open shaft onto the great sloping roof of the longhouse, illuminated in the moonlight, into the freezing night air. 

Vili finds them perched close by on the beam of a wooden truss, a child who looked to be around his age, with short-cropped scruffy fair hair, their wolf’s pelt cloak drawn tightly around their body, absentmindedly twirling a twig in their hand as they stare out past the flickering yellow-golden lamps and fire-light dotting the homes and streets of Stavanger below right out to the dark waters and fjords surrounding them. 

He knocks on the wood-frame a couple times with his knuckles to make his presence known (there have been a few close calls that he has almost fallen off this very roof due to a startling noise or unexpected visitor, and one time, a mischievous raven), and only realizes when the figure turns to face him who she is. 

The mauled, cauterized scar that spreads out from the side of her neck is unmistakable, as are the clear blue eyes that meet his in guarded curiosity. It's clear that he has interrupted something by her perplexed expression, and he imagines Odin's twin ravens _Huginn_ and _Muninn_ , the ravens of thought and memory, lifting off from each of her shoulders the moment he breaks her reverie.

“I thought you were a boy at first,” he admits to her, “because of your hair.”

“A kind way to greet a stranger,” she replies as she casts a quick look about his face. Her guard doesn’t let down. “You’re Hemmingson.”

“I suppose I am,” he answers, “but I do like to just be called Vili. And you are Varinsdóttir. The one who escaped death twice –” his eyes slide over to the mangled skin at the nape of her neck while she stares back at him coolly, lifting up one dark eyebrow “– and wears the mark of the wolf’s kiss as your prize. As the skalds tell it. What are you doing outside?” 

“I am not really one for feast days, I suppose,” she says softly. Though her words come out gentle, her voice has a low, roughened undertone to it that reminds Vili of calm water flowing over pebbles. _Another scar left by the wolves._

One look at her forlorn, distant expression after he mentions her injury, her past, and Vili understands almost immediately. When he was younger and didn’t know any better, any mention or question about his mother had caused his father to withdraw almost instantly, to seclude himself to his quarters, or to otherwise don an impersonal and rigid mask when he could not avoid being out. _It is a long and yet unhealed grief that overtakes him,_ Trygve once told him gently, _not any fault of your own. All that can be given to mend such loss is time._

He sits down next to her on the slope of the roof carefully, drawing his arms up around his knees as he lets out a warm breath into the cold before saying, “My mother died when I was small. I never even got to know her. I only know stories. Father still will not even speak her name, though it’s been many winters since she left this world.”

“I’m sorry,” Eivor says, looking right at him now, her eyes bright in the moonlight, “Now I’ve made you sad too.” 

He shakes his head, blinking rapidly a few times. An instinct, since the biting night air seems cold enough to freeze any tears that might have come. “It was long ago. Fate’s tapestry was already woven for her.”

They smile tentatively at each other. 

“I don’t really like feasts either,” he says. A half-truth. He dislikes the feasts where he has to learn to play any sort of political role or be otherwise deferred to by his status, especially above the other children or villagers.

“You sound like Sigurd,” she says. “Though he takes it as the chance to be the center of attention _all_ the time.”

He glances at the stick she’s been absently playing with in her hand, then has an idea.

“Do you want to learn how to fight?”

She tilts her head at him curiously. It would be a few more summers for them both until they’re trained. But being adopted into royalty would have its advantages… 

He grins at her. “Do not tell me you have never peeked into Styrbjorn’s war-chests before, Eivor.” 

A spark of mischief flashes through her face. “So you know how to fight then, truly?”

“The trainers at the barracks tell my father I will be ready to join any day now,” he says, unable to resist the surge of excitement from spilling into his voice, “they say I have the spirit of a _drengr_ in the making.”

“I do already see the bloated ego of one,” Eivor muses. “Alright then, O Great Vili Hemmingson, show me your ways.”

“Come on then, Varinsdóttir.” He stands up and holds out his hand out to Eivor, who grins as she reaches to grasp his hand, as he pulls her up and says, “your first lesson, from me. I’ll make a _drengr_ out of you yet.”

*

In the weeks that follow Vili and Eivor’s newfound friendship, with days marked with more mischief than both clans could have foreseen – much to the Trygve’s chagrin and Hemming’s amusement – the villagers of Stavanger and Fornburg can scarcely see one without the other, the dark-haired boy and fair-haired girl together always, running through the snow and mud-caked streets, sometimes bearing wooden practice swords or shields and other times fishing lines or hunting traps. 

When the lakes freeze over, they strap animal bones to their feet and glide on the ice with the other children, skidding and spinning and racing one another round and round until one of the gliders inevitably breaks through the ice and almost drowns. They stage elaborate fights and reenact the skald’s tales of mythic dragons and heroic mortals born to slay them, to which a particular dragon-slaying adventure and clever costuming choice leads to Vili being bestowed with the affectionate epithet Arse-stick. (“Vili the Arse-stick, greatest dragon in all the land,” Eivor shouts at him from across Fornburg one day; he doesn’t mind because he emptied a pouch of potent gassy herbs into her pudding at breakfast earlier, and soon they will have to sit through hours of a very important Althing at Styrbjorn’s hall...)

During feast days Vili and Eivor sneak mead and baskets of bread and cheese and Eivor’s favorite cakes onto the longhouse roof, with a pot of hot coals to warm their hands, as the muffled sounds of rhythmic drumbeats and singing from the feasting hall drift steadily out into the night while they watch and laugh at the drunken revelers beneath them dancing, brawling, and pissing in the streets.

They begin training by the next summer, of which their first tasks are to make their very first axes and shields together – gathering and stirring charcoal in the fire pits at Gunnar's forge to melt and shape the iron for the blades and the metal boss of the shields, which they carve and meld together from planks of spruce and fir, rimming the edges with leather and painting the surfaces with the insignias of their clans.

The weight of his very own axe and shield in his hands is a thrilling feeling, a rippling and nervous excitement bubbling in his gut, as he imagines the victories he will take with it. 

He and Eivor spar of course, but not like the play-fighting they once did with branches and sticks, nor with the awkward and heavy-handed motions from the weapons in the armory that are much too large for them, but with their custom-forged weapons and a brimming new sense of belonging and a future place in the clan. 

"Stop rolling around in the dirt and face me, piss-pot!" Vili circles around the dust, trying to spot Eivor, who weaves in and out from behind him, attempting to land a blow only to be blocked each time by a quick raise of his shield.

She flicks a throwing knife, blunted at the edges for practice, at him from his periphery, which he parries with ease. "You have your breeches all in a twist because you are too big and slow to catch me now, Arse-stick. You cannot defeat an enemy you can't even see." 

It is true. They are both growing fast now, and are taller than most of the other children in the village, but within a few moons he will be almost a full head taller than Eivor. His long limbs with their unfamiliar weight and motion are at a frustrating disadvantage compared to Eivor's lithe yet muscular and compact body. "You cannot dodge and evade forever, dear Wolf-Kissed. You will tire out before you can even land a strike.”

 _Wolf-Kissed._ How quickly the epithet catches on, once Eivor enters the barracks and begins hunting, sparring, and spending more time than ever before with her future brethren-in-arms. She grows her hair long and wears them in braids now, shaved the side where her scar sits so she can display her very first victory over death proudly. 

Vili teaches her how to play _hnefatafl,_ a strategy game played on an intricately marked up grid board, where one player takes the center formation of the king and his twelve defending pieces while the other player controls the surrounding twenty-four attacking pieces, the objective being either the successful escape or capture of the king. Vili has been playing with Hemming and Trygve since as long as he can remember and prides himself on being able to pull off clever combinations of shieldwall captures and feigning formations, but when he teaches it to Eivor, she learns it in a night and quickly becomes evenly matched with him, if not victorious over him more often than not (though he maintains that the count is close). 

One evening, after a late game by the hearth in Hemming’s hall – Vili wins this one, narrowly, and though he would never admit it he suspects Eivor fell into his feigning move simply to end the game early and sleep – they spread out their blankets and furs in a corner and get into their bedrolls, talking conspiratorially about the sorts of gossip only children playing in the background of oblivious and very drunk adults could pick up on. 

“Sigurd never told me he was to marry soon,” Eivor grumbles as she punches into her pillows to fluff them up. “We tell each other everything.”

“Perhaps she is ugly,” Vili offers up the easiest answer.

Eivor snorts. “Or has the personality of a stubborn old goat.”

“You and she shall get on wonderfully then.” 

“That is funny, I was going to suggest she would be a perfect match with you. Two arses for the price of one.”

“He is five winters older than you, is he not? He is of age, and it will be his duty to make a strong alliance as the next king,” Vili murmurs sleepily, turning over on his side to face Eivor. “Just as I one day will have to, and you as well.”

Her brow is furrowed, her eyes sharp and reproachful as they flicker over him. “I won’t. Styrbjorn has pledged to me that my path is mine alone to lead. I will not be bartered off to some sorry old jarl’s son to sit in dusty rooms all day. The only man I see in my future is the one I must kill to earn my honor back.”

“I do not think any jarl’s wife would be sitting in a dusty room all day,” Vili points out reasonably. “Have you seen Lófót? Their jarl has been abroad raiding for many seasons now, his wife Eydis is not only jarlskona of the islands in his place, but she rules all the clan’s houses and cattle farms, the money stores and trading routes, future alliances between families...it is almost frightening to think about, the wars she could wage if she had a spoonful of Kjotve’s bloodthirst.”

“Yes,” Eivor concedes, “but a bartering chip is a bartering chip, no matter how pretty the package is. Her father’s hand is still the one that gives it away.”

“It’s always the fathers,” Vili agrees. He is quiet for a moment, picks at the fraying strings at the edges of his blanket. “What about after, Eivor? What of your life beyond it? When you finally kill Kjotve.” 

These thoughts of the _future_ , that frustratingly foreign and ungraspable concept – for the future is intimately woven into one with the past, present, and fates of all others entwined with his within the Nornir’s loom – these questions he now poses to Eivor are ones that have begun to flit through his mind more frequently as he grows into his strength and role in the clan. His father and Trygve accordingly impose more lessons and duties onto him, responsibilities that he reluctantly shoulders, that as the jarl’s only son, he can no longer escape so easily from.

She is silent for a while. The fires crackle in the hearths behind them, the low buzz and murmurs of villagers still eating, drinking, and milling around the hall are comforting and warm, and he almost drifts off to sleep.

Eivor’s voice is a low rasp, blunt yet with a bareness that cannot conceal just the slightest edge of uncharacteristic hesitance.

“I do not know. I have never imagined myself to live past Kjotve’s death.”

*

Sometimes she wakes from nightmares of blood and death, bouts of fitful sleep that leave her shaking with terror and anger that will stir Vili wide alert and helpless with worry in the darkness. When this happens, his father will light the coals in the hearth, bring over a stool, a piece of carving wood and his knife, and will sing and hum to them softly in the warmth of the fire-light until Eivor stops shaking, closes her eyes, and they both fall into a gentle sleep once more.

Distant, long-ago slivers of memories always appear during these peaceful stretches. Memories of his mother, which are not really his but stories recalled and told to him by Trygve or from others in the longhouse, images of her sitting by the hearth where Hemming is now as his father sings him, then just a babe, to sleep. And just for a moment, this memory is breathed back into life. 

Hemming’s low, tender voice drifts reassuringly over them as Eivor rustles under her furs next to him and her breathing settles into an even pace. He imagines this moment stretching out forever.

 _Home_ , he thinks sleepily, happy and content. 

*

After Vili and Eivor’s first raid together on one of Kjotve’s outposts in the east mountains bordering Agðir, they naturally celebrate with round after round of drinking with their clansmen in the feast hall and games like drunken tug-o-war in the streets till dawn, until not one of them can so much as hobble without tipping over to the side of a ditch or retching on their shoes. 

Then come more firsts. The two of them get their first tattoos together, done by Sven, his in the shape of the rune of Aegishjalmr, the aegis of terror and protection, encircled on his right shoulder by the ouroboros of Jǫrmungandr, hers the Raven’s insignia just above her right ear, where it curves down and around until it just lightly grazes the edges of her scar. He starts growing a beard, which she pokes fun of; she keeps her flaxen hair long and swept up in braids she throws over one shoulder, her raven’s tattoo and scar always to be seen. _Wolf-Pissed,_ he calls her sometimes, _and you say_ I’m _the one with an ego._

There is his first heartbreak, at the hands of a shield-maiden who makes a love-pledge instead to a merchant’s son who promises to sail her to Miklagarðr, a great ancient walled city of sand and stone and jewels, and Eivor’s first dalliance with a skald’s daughter, which sends a resentful suitor to challenge her in the streets – luckily, Vili manages to intimidate the red-faced, bellowing and boorish embarrassment of a man back down from challenging her to a _holmgang_ , which surely would have ended in the suitor’s death. 

( _Vili the Arse-stick, Vili the peace-maker, he who fills them with dread,_ Eivor sings in different verses at him throughout the rest of the night, _though you have a troll for a face and much too stubborn a head,_ _shall I_ ever _get into a fight with such a dimwit again, you are surely the first I will call to put him to bed._ He tells her that her rhymes are bad and annoying. She responds by making them longer and worse.)

Their first silver arm-rings, finely-wrought metal bands engraved with their respective clan’s insignias, are presented to them by Styrbjorn and Hemming in front of their gathered clans after a daring raid and successful capture of an island full of berserkers controlled by Kjotve. The Norse, along with their Danish kin to the south, coveted arm-rings, for the more a warrior possessed, the more victories and alliances they had won, the higher their reputation was and greater their songs and tales.

“The first of many,” Eivor grins at him as they cuff the rings onto their forearms. “A life of glory and adventure awaits us, Vili. May it always be as such.”

*

In the spring, news arrives of the gravest kind, that the great warrior Ragnar Lodbrok has perished at the hands of King Ælla of Northumbria, thrown into a pit of vipers and left to a vicious, slow death. 

The skalds sing and weave story upon story of this grisly scene, but they all share one detail in common. That when gleeful Ælla turned to look over the pit, expecting to see pain and fear inflicted on Ragnar’s helpless face and body, humiliation of the worst kind in such a pitiful and macabre end, he sees only this, which in a single breath brings his smile down into the ugliest grimace like a stone weight plunging through water: Ragnar on his knees, his arms raised as if in praise, with a manic grin of bloodied teeth and beard in a face turned mad and burning with passion, shaking with the giddy and ruthless pure laughter that roars from his body as the endless coiling snakes writhe, bite, and thrash at him. 

_You think you have won this battle, but you have only started a war. I shall die a glorious death and greet All-father in his great golden halls. The same cannot be said for you. My sons will avenge me, my kin will conquer your lands, and your kingdoms will fall. We shall live on in every song and story your skalds and scops will tell about you and your children. O, how the little piglets will grunt when they know how the old boar suffered! You will meet them, Ælla! One day, they will come! Fate is unstoppable._

At least that is how the skalds tell it. For the heinous murder of a great and respected leader to be stained with such dishonor, there can only be one retaliation of the most feared kind: the blood feud. 

Ragnar’s sons, Halfdan, Ubba, and Ivarr stir the rage in their hearts and in the hearts of their kinsmen, organize their forces, and prepare to sail their longboats across the North Sea to England – but not to raid or pillage for merely wealth or resources, nor to procure _Danegeld,_ the tribute paid to the Northmen raiders by wary English rulers in exchange for temporary peace. 

This time, together with the Danish armies already present in England, they are going to enact vicious revenge on King Ælla of Northumbria, take and settle his lands, and should the gods be with them, they will conquer the rest of the splintered kingdoms of England.

And this is how the Great Army’s invasion of England begins.

The warriors of Hemming Clan will be part of the campaign’s first wave of forces to land in East Anglia by summer's end, led by the Ragnarssons. This will be Vili’s first taste of a true war campaign, not the petty clan battles and skirmishes over scarce resources and land in Norway.

Once land has been settled, the rest of the clan – the farmers, tradesmen, merchants, the rest of their families – will be sent for. But there is no going back once he leaves, he knows. The three spinners at the seat of Yggdrasill have woven into the pattern a knot that cannot unravel. 

Their home is in England now.

*

_Home._

Little echoes, little glimpses of the past like still-glowing embers in the dark. The scent of smoke and the sea. Fire-light dancing in bright blue eyes, the thrill of mischief and camaraderie. The bloodbeat of the war drums and ritual chant ringing battle-lust and sword-song in his ears. A yearning, buried deep, for an old equilibrium in the absent space at his side.

Memories that will come as if in a dream, in those hushed nights lying under woolen tents in the battle encampments of East Anglia or abandoned farmlands of Mercia, during the cold and soggy marches across Northumbria as the Great Army razes a bloody path through England’s fractured kingdoms. 

In time, these are the seeds from which a long dormant wish sprouts full-throated into a desire that haunts him in the shape of a single question: _What if?_

But that is not his fate just yet.


	2. bregða

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just as a note on timelines – Eivor first arrives in England in 873, and I imagine she meets Vili again sometime in 875 (why did you shove his arc so far back in the game Ubi??). This seemed a good hint that Vili and his clan would leave to be part of the Norse’s first invasion in 865, which is how I’ve set up the timeline of events historical and game-canon going forth in this story.
> 
> There's a discrepancy in the game with when Randvi says she and Sigurd get married and she joins Raven Clan - in the beginning she says it was a few years ago, whereas if you bring Vili back to Ravensthorpe and talk to her, she will say that she remembers him from before he left, which would mean she'd have joined the clan more than ten years prior. I decided to stick with the latter as it makes more sense consistency-wise for this story, as well as for them to marry at that age (as opposed to waiting almost a whole decade, which would have been extremely unusual for the culture and time period and I assume even more so for nobility).
> 
> For appearances, the concept art version of Eivor is how I imagine younger Eivor looking here, and Randvi’s concept art is her default look for me in this story, it’s just _such_ a good look. For teenage Vili, just imagine him lankier and not quite as built yet. 😋  
> 

Summer arrives in Rygjafylke on the cusp of a buoyant frenzy in the villages. Not only will the wedding of King Styrbjorn’s son draw every clan in the region and allies from afar – people even Sigurd will not have seen once before in his life – to his hall for the celebrations, an ordeal that will last more than a week long at the least, there is the undercurrent of anticipation for the voyage to war that will happen soon after it. The wedding feast will be the last time many in the clans will see one another, and it will certainly be the greatest in recent memory. 

The preparations for the revelry are extensive and exhausting, a constant stream of villagers entering and exiting the longhouse, carrying and setting down crates and chests of flatware and drinking cups, decorations and tapestries to adorn the walls of the hall, bedding linens and furs for the guests, stores of food both common and exotic, the finest fabrics and garments for the tailors. 

Vili and Eivor are attempting to get away with partaking in the lavish arrangements as little as possible – after all, he has found better things to do with his time as of late (not without Eivor's relentless teasing about how she never sees him anymore) and Eivor and Sigurd have taken to going on long hunts to free themselves of the crowded and hectic hall. On the days they cannot escape, they help Gunnar at his forge, where he and the other blacksmiths are hard at work day and night crafting the armor and weapons the army will need by summer’s end. There can only be as many swords and shields forged as there are supplies of wood and charcoal to melt the iron, and so Vili and Eivor are tasked with its replenishment.

Tending to the fire-pits to make charcoal is a tedious task that mostly ends up being a lot of sitting and watching – ensuring that the charcoal heaps are sealed from any drafts that may creep in and set the heap ablaze, a process that can last for days at a time to achieve a stable and pure wood-burn – and fortunately for them, Gunnar, being easy-going and with a great deal of affection for Eivor, with whom he shares a kindred past, does not mind at all what else they get up to during it.

The rest of the village goes about around them in a harried blur of voices and movement as they pass the time sitting around the fire-pits drinking ale and singing (“Wailing, more like,” Gunnar calls out at them from across the smithing yard where he’s hammering iron at the forge, before he comes over to join them for a round), sometimes with one of them playing a lyre or bone-flute. They amuse themselves by converting Gunnar’s workshop into a makeshift target range for axe-throwing and playing games that involve throwing hot coals at each other and attempting to catch and send them back before blistering their hands. 

So that is how they manage to burn their first batch of charcoal heaps past any use, and a disgruntled Gunnar sends them off to retrieve another wagonload of alder and birch wood from the lumber yards. 

“You need to practice your aim, Wolf-Kissed,” Vili says to her as they pull the wood-laden cart through Fornburg’s markets, passing stalls of smoked fish and meat, “if your throw hadn’t been so terrible, I would never have gotten distracted and let the charcoal burn.” 

“As if you’re the one to talk about aim." She elbows him in the side. “That axe you threw almost found itself buried in Gunnar’s roof.”

“It was you who climbed up there and put the target in the rafters,” he reminds her, “because of course Eivor Wolf-Kissed must show off at all times how high she can climb ordinary buildings.”

“I cannot help it, I have a reputation to uphold, unlike you.”

“A reputation for gloating? Indeed, we surely cannot let such a virtue be tarnished.”

They pass Tekla, directing a handful of men carrying barrels of what must be her best mead and ale up to the longhouse, as she waves an arm and gestures at them. “Sigurd is looking for you, Eivor. About to be married, and going on about some sort of adventure. If you ask me, he needs to get drinking early.” 

Sigurd does find her, after Vili and Eivor finally tow the heavy wagonload back to Gunnar with apologetic promises to come back the next day to set up the fire-pits again. Vili is washing the grime off his hands in a bucket of water while Eivor is perched on the fence, listening to Gunnar tell them a story about a wedding feast in his youth gone awry, when Sigurd bounds up to the workshop with a broad smile and that familiar ambitious glint in his eyes, spreading his arms out as he approaches. “Eivor! There you are.”

Eivor swings her legs over the fence and hops off to greet her brother, briefly embracing and clasping forearms with him and returning his smile with an enthusiastic laugh. “I hear the groom-to-be of Raven Clan has been looking everywhere for me. To what do I owe that unfortunate honor?”

Sigurd cuffs her playfully round the head as he turns to greet Gunnar and Vili. Gunnar moves off to attend to his forge as Sigurd leans against the workbench. “I have a favor to ask of you, Eivor. I have plans to retrieve an old Raven Clan heirloom, stolen from us long ago in a raid, from the pits of an Agðir encampment in the mountains. A grand old sword, to be precise.”

Vili catches on to the source of Sigurd’s enthusiasm. The ancestral swords of the bride and groom’s respective families are traditionally exchanged during the ceremony; Sigurd’s sword will be kept by his wife and eventually passed down to their first son, and of course Sigurd would have nothing but the best, and preferably chosen by his own hand. “But we have many grand old swords in our hall,” Eivor points out, “why not just save the trouble and take one of them?”

Sigurd shakes his head. “I want a challenge. I do not want something as important as this to be handed to me along with a boring long recitation of our family’s history. And this is what I need you for. Accompany me with retrieving it, Eivor. Just the two of us, quietly and quickly, like blades in the night.”

"Styrbjorn wants me to help Valka with the ritual preparations later. Why don’t you take Dag? He is always itching to get out with you." 

"Ah, Dag," Sigurd says cheerfully, "he is good, but your axe-arm is better. By my side on this hunt, Eivor, what say you?" 

"Of course, brother. I will make the time.”

“Good, good.” Sigurd looks towards the eastern mountains in thought as Eivor asks, “Have you met your bride yet? Randvi, is it?”

“We have met before,” Sigurd replies, “though I wish we had shared more words. But she is beautiful, and I hear as skilled in fighting and leading men as her brothers. Our alliance with Lagarvík through her clan will be a strong one. It is an important merchant town.”

“If she is as good as you say she is, then she is wasted on you, brother.”

“Perhaps,” Sigurd agrees. “You know I do not wish to simply follow in my father’s footsteps, Eivor. To re-trace a path already trodden. I seek grander ambitions for our clan, even beyond our lands. I cannot and will not always be at home.” 

“You are speaking of Miklagarðr. Again.” Eivor exchanges a look with Vili, who responds sensibly, “Surely not to raid, Sigurd? Such an old city and its people will not let you sneak in and pillage their sacred places so easily.”

“It is so. But something calls me there still. One day, at least.” He looks to Eivor. “You understand me, sister, right?”

Eivor nods, grasping his arm. “Of course. You know I am behind you, Sigurd, wherever your path takes you.” 

Sigurd accompanies them back to the longhouse, where they are met by Styrbjorn, in conversation with some of his advisers by the entrance. 

“The three of you, all together? This cannot be good,” Styrbjorn says to them as he waves his advisers off. “I am glad to see you, but I am more glad to see that there are no houses burnt down around you this time. Yet, at least.”

“That was more a shack than any sort of lodging,” Sigurd replies amiably. “The bastard deserved it.”

“That’s right, I told you two not to take a torch to that sad little shack,” Eivor tuts at Sigurd and Vili.

“You told us to take the torch to the _other_ shack, sister. The one with the bastard still inside.”

“Ha! It would have served him right to get his ass set on fire.” Eivor grins with delight. “Maybe that would sober him up the next time he thinks about trying anything on the girls at the bathhouses.”

Sigurd tilts his head to her in deference. “Vengeance is your specialty, dear sister, not mine.”

Styrbjorn raises a hand to his forehead and rubs his temples. “Sigurd, are you not the one to be gathering and making ready the sacrifices for the wedding ceremony? _Your_ wedding ceremony?” 

“Oh, that was supposed to be my job?” Sigurd says in surprise.

“It is like he is not just about to get married,” Eivor marvels. “I fear for poor Randvi.” She dodges a playful punch from Sigurd. 

“Do not be too harsh on our Prince of Ravens,” Vili says to her, “for his honor is at stake and it is in short supply.” That earns him a jab too, and soon the three of them are tussling, laughing as they trade lighthearted blows with each other.

“Come now,” Styrbjorn sighs as they scuffle around him.

“Have no worry,” Eivor says as she recollects herself, panting slightly. “When it is time to say my piece for the feast toast, I shall have insults and stories of our prince to make even Bragi blush.”

Styrbjorn’s reprimanding scowl is tinged with affection as he looks them over. “Gods, the three of you forever idling about like children. I will never understand how anything gets done in this village.”

“I have been saying that for years,” Sigurd tells him.

Styrbjorn claps his son on the shoulder and nods to Vili and Eivor before turning to head back into the hall. “I am not going to even tell you two to keep yourselves out of trouble before the feast begins. And son, do not forget the ceremonial sword at the very least, if you are so insistent on making things harder for yourself.”

Sigurd moves to follow his father, dipping his head towards Eivor as he leaves. “At nightfall then, Eivor.”

Eivor turns to Vili as she dusts her hands off on her tunic. “I’ll need to go see Valka now if I want any chance of going with Sigurd to retrieve the heirloom later. You will be alright without my watchful eye, Arse-stick?” 

“I hope so,” he says, absentmindedly straightening out his sleeve as he fights down the tiny prickle of nervousness that surfaces at the thought of his next task. _I must be true to myself._ “I will be going to see Astrid. I have something important to ask her.”

“Ah! Of course.” Eivor’s eyes brighten and her lips quirk up with mischief. “The lady of the hour. You cannot keep sneaking out in the evenings to see her, you know. My excuses are getting drab and I don’t believe for a moment that your father or Trygve has ever believed them. Spare my poor _hugr_ from the weight of your lies.”

“Eivor,” he says seriously, and pauses. Should he even ask? “Do you think, I mean...would it be unwise, if I asked her to come with me? To England?" He tries to make it not sound bad, naive and pleading, but it comes out as such anyway.

Eivor looks at him for a moment, registering the earnestness of his tone as the playful expression on her face morphs quickly into solemnity and she considers his question thoughtfully. She did not laugh. For all her teasing, Vili has never so much appreciated Eivor’s candor as he does now.

“Do you intend to marry her?” A practical question, and the most important one. Public displays of courting were looked down upon unless the man had the explicit intention of marrying the woman soon thereafter. Hence his sneaking around at night to see her.

“I thought we would have more time before I had to think about that, but England will not wait, it seems. Yet I also cannot ignore my feelings.” Not exactly an answer, but that is the truth. He does not know how things will fare in England, if they are able to build any home there at all, but he does know that he wants her to be there with him.

Eivor contemplates this for a moment. “Astrid is the daughter of a _goði_ , from a farming settlement. She has a lot to gain by staying here with her people, her family, her family’s land and influence, not to mention she is invaluable to them as a daughter who can make a good alliance with another rich or powerful family. They will not let her go easily. On the other hand...she has a lot to lose by following you to England and throwing all of that away. It may be many seasons of war and fighting before you are even able to properly settle down. She may as well start from nothing.”

“You speak true.” How often had Vili wished that he and Astrid could escape for this very reason, the both of them tied to the weight of a heritage that only pulled them back, restrained them from being able to love each other freely without the burden of status and lineage, to finally _feel_ free.

Farmers were just below the nobility class in terms of status, and certainly above the rest of the _karl_ class – the tradesmen, merchants, laborers – as they owned the most land, and thus possessed significant influence in politics. Eivor is right; he could not promise marriage or a stable life within the next year, or even several, and the loss of a daughter without a clear immediate monetary or political advantage gained through a marriage alliance with another family of similar or higher status, would be a significant blow to Astrid’s family, if they even deigned to accept it. Some families were known to begin a blood feud over such a thing. 

Marriage was first and foremost a political maneuver; love usually bloomed only thereafter in marriage. Such was their way of things.

“If my opinion is worth anything,” Eivor ventures gently after a long ponderous silence. “I would still ask. I would not have this hang over my head in the hard months to come. Speak from your heart, Vili, and if she feels as strongly, Freyja’s blessing will surely guide the rest of the way.”

“Thank you, Eivor.”

“She has cast a love-sick spell on you,” Eivor smiles with warmth in her eyes, “I have not seen you like this ever. Unnaturally quiet, _thoughtful_ even. Reduced to a soppy mush, unknowing of yourself or your future, where once you stood so stubbornly proud that nothing else but battle and the endless blood-feast could stir your heart so. I question her taste – ” he rolls his eyes and gives her a gentle shove as she chuckles “ – but your trueness I can see clear as day in your eyes.”

*

How can he explain his feelings about Astrid? Desire has unraveled him. He becomes someone other than himself when he thinks of her, someone entirely new and unknown to himself, as if Freyja herself has tugged loose a string within the fabric of his _hugr_ and unfurled it entirely in a single flourish. In her presence, he becomes someone separate from the looming shadow of his lineage, from the invisible shackles of a future he feels no pull towards. She made him forget himself; she made him feel _free_. She was a future where this feeling was not only possible, but permanent.

_“I could stay here forever,” he tells hers in the open field they lie together in, as they gaze up at the stars and the lights of the Bifrost weaving luminous green through the night._

_“You would choose this over going to battle?”_

_“I would choose you.”_

_A smile so brilliant he feels the whole of Miðgarðr spiral down to exactly the space of a breath between them._

Could such a thing be? Oh, how he desired it so very much. A future in which he did not have to be anything more than exactly what he was.

*

“You do not love him.” 

“Love has nothing to do with why we marry. You know that better than anyone.”

“Come with me. Please. We can start anew.”

“England is years from being settled. I have a past here. A family and land. I have influence, power here. Do not strip me of that, Vili.”

“This is your choice then? Not your father’s?”

She finally looks at him. Eyes green and still as the earth, unwavering. “This has always been my choice. Don't paint me the victim when it is the opposite. Vili, I _want_ to marry this man. The peace-pledge will benefit both our families, and will be so much more. _I_ will be able to be, to do, so much more. And I will be good at it.”

“I know you will,” he says sadly, because that is the only thing he seems able to say, and because he knows her mind will not be changed. 

She watches him, unspeaking, then touches her hand to his face, cradling his cheek softly. She traces her hand lightly down the side of his neck, down to his collarbone, his chest, until she stops right above where his pulse is beating frantically, desperate and wild, beneath her touch.

“My dreamer.” Her words are soft, her smile gentle and sad. “Our fates have not been spun together.”

The skalds have a hundred different ways to describe the sight and smell of blood on the battlefield, a thousand meters devoted to the blinding rush of victory, but he cannot think of a single line that can describe what he feels now.

*

A day before the wedding, and Fornburg is bursting at its seams with guests and dignitaries from all over Norway. Colorful ribbons and garlands have been strung up around the village, copper braziers and pots of fresh flowers line the streets, which have been swept clean, and Norse men and women Vili has never seen before are milling around in fine clothes, showing off their best arm-rings and trinkets of wealth. 

Anyone who was someone – or hoped to be someone – and cared about being in the good graces of King Styrbjorn and the Raven Clan would be here for Sigurd’s wedding. Marriage feasts were the epitome of political play, and Vili wonders sullenly if he will be reminded of this every wedding celebration he attends for the rest of his life.

Vili has taken refuge from the pre-celebrations at Gunnar’s, where he has at least been able to make himself useful, though he is not himself – quiet, withdrawn, and Gunnar notices this, but to his great relief and appreciation, he does not treat him any differently.

"Thank you for helping me, Vili. I must say, you are a much better worker when Eivor's not around." 

"I have heard that before once or twice." Vili smiles slightly. "Your craft is unmatched, Gunnar," he says, admiring the rack of newly minted shields, "I enjoy spending time here." 

Gunnar chuckles. "It is nice to hear that every once in a moon, but there is no need for it. You don't need to tell me why you've such an interest in helping me forge weapons and tending the fire-pits all of a sudden, but if you need an ear, Vili...I'm here." 

Gunnar possessed that rare quality of openness and acceptance that has never led Vili to feel as if he needed to hesitate or appraise whether or not to tell him something personal. “It’s a girl,” he sighs.

“Ah,” Gunnar nods sagely, leaning against the post with his arms crossed, “they can be troublesome. May I offer you some advice…?”

“Alright,” Vili says hesitantly, wondering how much he needed or wanted to hear what Gunnar had to say on love.

"Arse-stick!" Eivor calls out at him from across the street. Her boots squelch in the mud as she crosses over the yard to Gunnar’s.

"Wolf-Pissed," he says back half-heartedly, almost wishing he did not have to see her. "Have you finally woken from your beauty sleep?" 

"I was looking for you, actually. All day yesterday. And all this morning." 

"Ah, well here I have been," Vili gestures at the smithing yard, "you should brush up on your tracking skills." 

"I'll leave you two alone." Gunnar kicks off from the post and dusts off his hands on his apron before heading back to his workshop.

Eivor comes to sit by him as he crouches by one of the charcoal heaps in the fire-pits that have begun to smoke, and he seals the charcoal back up with fresh earth to keep it from catching fire. 

"It is true, though. I have been looking for you. Have you been alright?" After a moment of silence, she asks quietly, "Is it Astrid? She said no, then?" 

He doesn't look at her. “She chose this life, Eivor. She wanted to stay. There is nothing more to say.”

"She wanted to be with you," Eivor says gently, “but she has other matters, other people to think of. I am sure it was not chosen lightly.”

He shakes his head. This is something he cannot describe to her. “You do not know this feeling, Eivor,” he tells her. “You have not loved.” _Not like this._

“I have not,” she concedes, “but I know that love is not a choice for us. We marry because we must, for land, money, survival. It is the way of things. Love only grows in time with Freyja’s blessing.”

“No,” Vili says back, unable to stop himself, “Desiring someone, wanting to be with them may not be a choice. But love is, like an oath, a pledge – ” he struggles to form the words around the jagged rupture in his heart “ – something you uphold, fight for. Something you _choose_.” _I have to believe that is what it is._ “And she made her choice, and that is what hurts.”

Not thinking, he adds, “Your parents would know. They loved each other before they married.” 

A beat. "And now they are dead," Eivor responds softly, her gaze turned sharp and like stone, “their lives stained with dishonor. Their love was not a blessing." 

Vili does not say anything, knows he has stepped over a line, but he does not want to take it back. She tried to understand, but she did not know everything. "I am sorry, Eivor," he eventually says wearily, turning to look at her, finally, through the wood-smoke. "I have not been myself. I just need time." 

Her expression relaxes slightly and she looks over him for a moment. "Perhaps what we need for you to do now is to forget these sorry events. It will be a wedding day soon, after all. Who can be sad on a wedding day, least of all a grand wedding for Raven Clan?" 

He checks the pits one last time to make sure they are burning stably, then motions over to Gunnar, at his workbench whetting a blade, that he is about to leave. "If you are suggesting what I think you are, Eivor," Vili says, getting up from the ground and shaking off dirt, fully ready to subsume himself in drink, "then you will have to beat me to the mead barrels in the back first."

*

If feasts are political performance, then the general rule of thumb is this: the larger and more lavish the feast, the less it is about the original cause for celebration. This feast is not about Randvi and Sigurd, or even about Sigurd himself; it is solely about its host, King Styrbjorn, his wealth and his influence, the role that each person in attendance plays in his hall. _Here is the seat of my power. Here are my allies. Stand with me, or watch out._

A show of generosity from the host in exchange for a show of fealty from its attendees, each and every one of them who will be accounted for by their status, by their placement in the hall, seats at the tables, food and drink they will be served with, down to the very types of plates they eat off of. 

Fortunately, Vili has been drunk enough since yesterday to momentarily forget his disdain for all of this pageantry, and really is too numb to feel much of anything at all, which was of course, the goal. He barely remembers the wedding ceremony (only that Eivor whispers to him some crude joke about the sword she and Sigurd had retrieved, just as Sigurd is presenting it to Randvi and the _völva_ is sprinkling ritual water onto the couple in the shape of Mjölnir – which is certainly a symbol of fertility on this day solely for its resemblance to something else entirely – all in a very grave and symbolic moment, that he almost ruins by snorting out loud), and when he half-stumbles into the feasting hall along with everyone afterwards, he has half the mind to find a nice warm corner to take a nap instead. 

Styrbjorn’s hall is at its most resplendent, colorful tapestries interwoven with gold hanging from walls, the braziers and candles lit, the hearths blazing, the feast tables laden with food. 

Gods, the food. The sweetest mead made with spiced oranges and apples baked in cinnamon. Red and white wines from Frankia. Spices from Miklagarðr, and a dark, bitter hot drink that tastes like drinking a liquified thunderbolt, like the substance that must have forged Mjölnir itself (and it does not mix well with the alcohol at all, Vili finds out the hard way). Spit-roasted suckling pig glazed with honey and herbs, oysters and mussels basted in parsley and almond milk, roasted duck with crisped skin and lamb and pork belly fried with butter and fat. Vili has to stop Eivor from hoarding all of the honeyed flour cakes, topped with figs and walnuts and dried berries, to herself. The dishes get less exotic the farther from the high tables they are, but are cooked to perfection nonetheless – no one is leaving Styrbjorn’s hospitality tonight without one of the best, if not _the_ best, meals they’ve ever had. 

Sigurd and Randvi feast at the high table, while Eivor and Vili are seated nearby along with Styrbjorn's closest friends and most important allies first, until the guest list trickles down to the least familiar or reputable sitting furthest away, mixed in with the rest of the villagers. Randvi has acclimated herself to Raven Clan swiftly – after they formally introduce themselves to her (her green eyes, clever and alert even after drinking Sigurd under the table, remind him uncomfortably of someone else), she and Eivor talk as if they have known each other for years. 

There is entertainment, music and skald's poems recited to harp and lyre, in between each course. Eivor gives her speech, which sends her clansmen roaring with laughter and leaves Sigurd with the faintest flush of red on his face, but even that is quickly forgotten as the night wears on and the activities increase in physicality. There is dancing and acrobatics, and groups break out in the middle of the hall to play sports and games, while the first inevitable drunken brawl happens by the fifth course.

The night passes in a blur of bodies and joyous cacophony, he with Eivor and his friends old and new from the clans and villages, all spread out together under the same warm amber light of the hall, and despite the fact that he can’t quite orient exactly where his body is in respect to everything else around him (and stumbles even more when Eivor, laughing, throws one arm around him and tries to set him upright), he feels more happy than he is sad for the first time that week, and for a moment the world seems to be alright again. But just for a moment.

*

Vili wakes up sometime close to dawn after the worst sleep (did he even sleep?) of his life, his head pounding as if he had just drank for three days straight, which he did, and eventually once he comes to his senses, finds himself wrapped into some blankets on the ground in a corner of the longhouse. Groaning, Vili manages to detach himself from the blankets and roll over on his side to lift his head up marginally, just enough to see the sprawling mess of sleeping bodies that are strewn across the hall, on the benches or against the walls, some covered in furs or blankets and some not even clothed at all. Eventually, they would all rouse themselves out of their hangovers and start the celebrations – albeit on a slightly smaller scale – all over again.

He looks over and sees Eivor asleep, slumped against the wall next to him with her head tilted to the side and one shoulder hunched up to support herself. She doesn’t have any blankets around her, so Vili staggers to his knees, and then up on his feet to find some furs to drape over her. Ignoring the utterly crippling pain shooting through his muscles (what did he _do_ last night?) as he hobbles between the tables and bodies, searching, he finally secures some and hauls them back slowly to Eivor. 

As gently as he can, he shifts and tucks the furs around her sleeping body. Her hair has fallen out of her braids and she’s somehow gotten a slight black eye, which makes Vili wonder how much worse he looks. Then, satisfied with his work, he lurches over to the side where she has been steadily drooping down the wall and settles himself beside her so that her head can rest on his shoulder. 

In the quiet calm he listens to the sound of her breathing, feels the rise and fall of her body settled against his, and he realizes that it has been some time since they have slept next to each other in the longhouse like this. The nights they spend together with their clansmen on hunts or watch duties don’t count. This is something else, something that is entirely theirs. Warm, muted feelings bubble up from somewhere beneath his head-throbbing misery. _Home_. He realizes that he has missed it.  
  


*  
  


It only occurs to him, years later, that the person he thought he would miss the most once he left Norway might never have been Astrid at all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
> I wasn't sure if I was going to delve into Vili’s backstory with Astrid, but figured it must have been significant enough to leave such a strong impact on him if he’s telling ship stories and reminiscing about it still so many years later. Young love, what can you do? 🥰


	3. cyþan

The longships lining the harbor are beautiful carved things, their graceful curved prows curling upwards into the menacing snarl of dragon’s heads, more than a dozen sleek vessels all gently riding the rise and fall of the waves in Stavanger’s bay. These ships are larger than the usual swift light boats they used to coast the shallow waters of the fjords; broader and with twice the depth, they are made to transport people and cargo across the sea-roads. Made to sail to war.

Vili watches the ships bob gently up and down in the bay from the shore, where he’s on horseback, trying to discern the various clan insignias emblazoned on the shields that hang on the sides of the ships. By this time tomorrow, he would be on one of those ships somewhere out on the North Sea with thirty or so of his clansmen, manning one of the oars or wrangling with the ropes that held the mast and sail; the conditions, he was told, appeared favorable and with Njörðr's blessing, they would make the voyage in less than four days time. 

There is a palpable excitement and restlessness, a strange energy that stirs in the air before such saga journeys begin. For Vili, it is in equal measure relief and consolation, at having an uncomplicated purpose to throw himself into, a role to play in which he need only be the straight arrow loosed to its target, one that resolves itself in a single clean arc.

He has never been very good at resolution. He picks at the ragged edges of his feelings too often, as if they would offer up a different answer, another solution each time. The sullen heartache has dulled over the weeks, somewhat, but the wishing for it, for that certain simple lost future still rears up if he lets it; an irritating and searing barrage of _what if, could have, should have_ barreling through his thoughts and giving no quarter. Time, he supposed, closed up all things but desire. 

“Not much more time, now.” Eivor comes up beside him on her horse, glancing out at the view of the ships in the harbor. “It is strange to know this will be our last ride through these lands together.”

Vili nudges his horse forward and looks away from the bay. “Let’s not wait any longer then.”

They ride past the grey sand shores, the wind-swept cliffs still green with the last traces of summer, into the glen past the apple orchards and through the wide open meadows of soft purple heather, up the grassy slopes until they are high enough along the ridge to take in the lands of their clans, clusters of villages and squares of farmland nestled in the soft curves of the valleys and white-peaked mountains. 

“Your land,” Eivor says, indicating the farmlands and settlements below them to the west that were under the rule and protection of his clan, “and mine,” she sweeps her gaze to the east towards Fornburg, “side by side. For as long as I’ve known...and soon it will be no more.”

“Change is the nature of things, Eivor. But it will not be that much different, not for a while. Most of our people will still be here.” 

He turns to face her, and catches the gleam of sun-glow on the silver beads in her braids. The warm summer light spins her long flaxen-hair to gold, touches the sharp angles of her face where only the dark furrowed brow gives away her perplexed quiet. He knows that look well. 

She lifts her head up towards him to meet his eyes, her contemplation replaced with a curious look. Her eyes are fierce steady blue on his, and unconsciously he shifts forward a hairsbreadth, as if pulled by the intensity of her gaze.

"It is funny,” she says. “I had an image cross my mind just now, of us. Here on these horses, yet much older than we are now, surveying these very same lands – our lands – together. As if this were a future that would be woven had you stayed here instead of going to England." 

Silence swells between them as her gaze holds his, and he does not look away. An expectant weight lingers in the air; she was waiting for a response. Vili blinks fast and shifts in his seat to adjust his saddle. "Perhaps you are seeing glimpses of the Nornir's threads as they weave, threads that disappear as soon as you take notice of them, for they are not what is about to happen." 

"Perhaps.” She glances away, finally, and the silence returns to a light and comfortable peace between them. They sit for a while on their horses, looking out, the breeze tickling Vili’s neck as he sweeps his eyes from mountains to sea again and again. He wills himself to not forget this old home of his once he leaves, to hold on to it all.

But how can he know what is important to pay attention to, to remember? He has not lost anything yet. So he settles for trying to imprint this view, every detail of it, as much as he can to his memory. It is like trying to drink the ocean in large, hungry gulps while swimming in it. He hopes that it is enough.

Then they race back down to the open fields and woodland, heading towards the cliffs that overlook his village, where Vili can smell and taste the salt spray, hear the sea-birds from their perch on the rocks as they near. They slow down so they can talk, and Eivor tells him of the clan politics that will ensue in the region once the large fleet of Rygjafylke’s warriors departs tomorrow, her foresight courtesy of Styrbjorn’s connections.

The departure of so many warriors would leave a power void of sorts that was already beginning to reveal itself in the increasing trade and naval conflicts near Avaldsnes, the prominent merchant port ruled by Hjörr Halfsson. Hjörr came from a long line of Avaldsnes kings of the famed Ogvaldr dynasty, and the village was known implicitly to be the true seat of power among the kingdoms of Rygjafylke; he and his wife Ljufvina controlled all trade activity that passed through the Karmsund waterway leading south past Avaldsnes, taxing ship passage and carrying out the region's major trading and alliance-building with the lands north and beyond to Frankia. 

To make matters worse, the king of Vestfold had died, and now his newly crowned son Harald was rumored to be seeking a marriage alliance with Gyda, daughter of King Eirik of Hordafylke directly to Rygjafylke’s north (“He is younger than us by a couple summers, but already has double his father’s ambition and cunning,” Eivor says), in what Hjörr and Styrbjorn expected would be the very beginning of a series of maneuvers inevitably targeting the seat of power at Avaldsnes. 

In other words, Hjörr had said, there could not be a more inopportune time for Rygjafylke to send off an entire fleet of its warriors abroad. He was wealthier than even Kjotve of Agðir, but money cannot replace a full fighting force.

 _A kingdom cannot sustain itself on raiding and plunder forever,_ he remembers Hjörr declaring at an Althing once, _We must learn to use diplomacy, not swords._ To which Styrbjorn had snorted and responded, _Are you still Norse? You’ve spent too much time with the Frankians. They merely dress up the bloodshed and call it a war._

“The clan skirmishes never end, do they?” Vili says rhetorically once she finishes.

“Resources get scarcer by the year. Perhaps your clan has the right idea, going to settle new lands. And strangely enough, Kjotve has been quiet in his kingdom. Which can only mean trouble soon.”

Vili shoots her a glance, full of – what, warning? Caution? Knowing that she probably wouldn’t listen to him anyway? Eivor’s thirst for vengeance only grew as she got stronger; yet she could not restore her honor if she got herself killed doing it.

He settles for, "Don't face him until you are sure you can kill him." _Don’t die while I’m gone._

They reach the cliffside, as she murmurs, “Here’s another place we have not been back to in some time.”

Vili swings a leg off his horse to get off. “Our hideout for escaping Trygve’s plans for making us useful contributing members of our clans.”

Eivor glances around the high rocky ledge as she dismounts. “I hope if – when – you come back, it will still look like this.”

“We speak as if I have already been gone for many winters. I have not left yet.”

He hears a soft caw from overhead. A familiar raven is circling them from above, gliding effortlessly around the rock face. “Hello, Sýnin,” he greets the bird when she comes to land on a nearby stone, cocking her head up at him quizzically. “I am afraid I don’t have any mice for you today.” 

He remembers when Sýnin first came to Eivor, then still small enough to fit in her palm. They were on the roof of his father’s hall one late evening, just a few weeks ago, watching the summer sun sink below the mountains and bleed the skies a fiery red. 

_“Odin’s raven calls to you. It is true what the völvas say, you are favored by the gods.”_

_He holds out a hand to the young raven, which nips at his finger before ruffling its feathers and turning back to nudge its beak at Eivor’s belt pouch._

_“The birds call to you too, Vili.” She opens the pouch and cedes a handful of dried berries to the raven._

_“Ingrid was a chicken, Eivor.”_

_“And a noble bird she was!”_

Eivor walks over to crouch by Sýnin, who pecks affectionately at her fingers, as she sweeps her long braids back over one shoulder and rummages in her belt pouch. She pulls free some bright yellow-orange cloudberries and offers them to the raven. 

"Speaking of that, Vili. You are about to depart on a grand journey. Yet it is still troubling you."

She doesn’t need to specify what ‘it’ is – they have mulled it over enough times, of course, with him tugging at those strands of uncertainty in its infinite variations, and her taking them into attentive consideration each time. He is not good at resolutions. (“You do not tire of this?” he asked her once, an afterthought. “No. I do not tire of this.” And then, “If I did, you would know it. Besides, this is far more preferable to you getting yourself into some ox-headed scheme from which I must rescue you from. That is beyond my compensation.” “This tale sounds awfully familiar, Wolf-Kissed. Have you looked in the mirror lately?”)

He shrugs noncommittally. “The thoughts do not leave me.”

Eivor gives him a serious look as she treats Sýnin to one last scratch and the raven takes off, then she settles herself down cross-legged by the cliff’s edge, the wind blowing strands of hair across her face, and waits for him. He obliges and comes to sit beside her, stretching one leg out and propping an arm up on his knee as they look out over Stavanger and the fleet of ships in the bay. He watches small figures in the open field below, probably the village children, as they play and chase each other. 

Here were the loose ends, laid bare again. “I feel excitement for this new future, of course I do. Tomorrow is the beginning of sagas. But if this is the path I was meant to walk, then why must I feel the urge to fight against it every step of the way?”

“Perhaps because it is not your truest desire?”

The waves lap and spray on the rocks below. Brief flashes of someone else, in another life, a different time. What would he even do in that life? Clear some land, chop the trees, build a house and perhaps a boat, tend to some goats and cows, sow and reap the harvest season after season? Somewhere deep inside, as if in affirmation, a turmoil calms. The children have stopped running and are playing a different game now, clustered together in a circle. An adult – one of their mothers? – comes to them, beckons them over. 

“You suggest that I am being untrue to my desires, or worse yet, that I do not know them.” _And so I do not know myself, then?_

Eivor picks up a rough stone, brushes the dirt off it with her hands and absently plays with it. “We are more than our desires. But if they are to drive our will and hold our _hugr_ steady, then we must align them with each other. Otherwise we will falter and move nowhere at all, trapped in place.”

“Yet your desires, for revenge, for glory, have always been aligned rightly with your _hugr_ , Eivor. You are always certain of what you must do next. You are never lost.” He says this without bitterness, though weariness seeps into his voice.

“I am lost more often than you think. But I know what helps.” She gets up, still holding the rock, and stretches slightly, her form illuminated against the bright clear sky, before she starts searching for...more rocks. Of course. 

Inside his mind, Vili sighs. Vili hates building cairns. Detests them. Instead of the patience and sharpening of wit or whatever tranquility of _hugr_ he’s supposed to be feeling, he gets irascible and frustrated and impatient with the slow repetitive movements, the inevitable toppling of an almost-finished tower, the search for a stone that is not too flat, nor bulky, nor angled. ( _You cannot_ search _for peace, Vili, you must let it come to you_ , Eivor would say serenely as he bites a snarky retort back because she just looks _so_ untroubled and focused, smiling a little as if in a private joke with herself as she turns a stone over in her fingers several times before gently lowering it onto her stack.) 

But she enjoys it. Eivor would stack cairns all day if she could, and nothing else would ever get done again. More than that, it is one of the few, if not the only times that Eivor mentions her parents without malice or the thoughts that darkened her mind into revenge and bloodlust. Sometimes she recalls to him stories they would tell her while they built cairns together, memories free of anger and resentment. He likes when she repeats her mother’s words and advice to him softly as she moves stone from hand to hand, because he can imagine that they are something his own mother might have once said to him, had she lived. 

And so Vili is more than happy to sit until the muscles in his back knot up and his legs and joints cramp to see her finally lay the last stone atop a tower just as dusk falls. _Look_ , she would say proudly, turning to him with a smile like the sun, _a fine cairn, is it not?_

This time, he decides to try a different tactic. He watches Eivor’s movements closely, hoping to pick up a trick, a sleight of hand or a pattern, as her deft fingers stack a handful of misshapen rocks one on top of the other, leaving them to rest at crooked and perilous angles to each other.

His gaze travels up to where her eyes are tipped downward in focus, her lips slightly pursed. The sunlight casts shadows onto her profile that deepen the sharp contours of her features, sheds a golden glow on her smooth and unmarked skin. Her brow, so often raised in shrewd curiosity or narrowed in resolve, is even and unfurrowed. Relaxed, unworried. Almost as if time had just ceased, let up its great weight, the endless weaving of the Norns paused momentarily on their looms. 

“What?” she asks, when she glances over at his miniscule stack of rocks and catches him looking at her.

He smiles. “You look at peace, is all.”

By the time Eivor places her last rock and looks up, satisfied, the sun is lowering beneath the darkened mountains and the golden-red glow of the shrinking light spreads long shadows in the water that ripple through the bay. 

“We should get back in time for the _blót_ tonight,” she says as they stand up and admire their handiwork. His own stacks never get quite as high nor as complex as hers, but it is the effort that counts, he supposes.

“No goodbyes yet, Eivor.”

She pauses, hesitant, as if she is pondering how to say her next words. "Fine. But before we go…”

“Don’t say you’re worried about me now. That might make me re-think our friendship.”

“I won’t worry about you out there in the big world. I know your clansmen will take good care of you.” She grins at him. “I have never met a more beloved jarl's son than the thick-headed troll in front of me." 

"Ha! We shall have to compare our battle scars when we meet again. Mine from my victorious battles in England, yours from fighting Kjotve's dogs here in Norway." 

"I would like that." 

Eivor must have seen the benign worry flash across his face. She steps close and gives his arm a reassuring touch. “We will see each other again, Vili. That I am certain of.”

“Here,” she says. She holds out her left forearm and slides an arm-ring off from it. “Take this.”

“Your first ring.” Vili recognizes the twin ravens engraved into the fine silver band, from when they had been presented their first rings together.

Eivor nods. “To many more, remember? And comes with it all the good memories of our clansmen, the raids, and feast nights, and drunken mornings stumbling about in Stavanger’s piss-streets…”

“Don’t hesitate to break it into pieces if you need the silver,” she adds as he takes the ring from her and cuffs it around his arm, running his fingers along the fine grooves of the band. “I would hate to see my sentimentality be the reason for your starvation. Though you’d blow it all on drink, and not even the good kind.”

“Where would I ever be without such wise and persistent counsel?” he says. “Much happier, I suspect. So much peace and quiet I won’t know what to do with myself.”

Eivor leans in, a smirk flitting across her face. “You mean, _who_ would you be? There is no one else in all of Norway – and England, obviously – more of a fool than me to put up with you all day.”

“For once we’re in agreement. And perhaps my absence will be a good thing. You might even learn how to properly block now that you don’t have me taking your heavy blows for you.”

At the very last moment, Vili raises his arm and shrugs off his own silver ring, his first one. The band is similarly made to Eivor’s, inscribed with the outline of Clan Hemming’s dragons and bearing scratches from having been worn on his arm for years. It was his favorite to wear, out of pure sentimental value, but now he has a better one to replace it with. 

He lays it in his palm and holds it out for her. “For you, Eivor. My truest friend.”

Eivor’s smile widens as she accepts the arm-ring. She wriggles it onto her forearm and brings up her elbow to turn it this way and that in the golden light, admiring it. “You could just say you’re going to miss me, Arse-stick.”

*

Before the _blót_ , the village children crowd around him in front of Hemming’s hall and pester him for a story. 

“Vili! You’re back! You said you would tell us the story of how Odin discovered the runes.”

“No, how he tricked and stole the mead of poetry from the _jötnar_!”

He smiles. “You will hear it later, during the _blót_ ,” he says to them. A blood sacrifice to summon the gods for war. It will not be him but his father, as the clan chief, who will recite from one of the great epics in praise of Odin during the ritual.

The children persist, and Vili relents, though with a different story. He jests and feigns annoyance at having better things to do than tell stories all day, but the simple delight and earnest listening of the children is deeply gratifying, though he is no storyteller, no skald with Odin’s gift of speaking in poetry, and holds no vast vault in his mind of the memories, the sagas and eddas of ages and worlds past.

Fortunately, children are not so interested in the embellishment of deeds as grown men are. They listen to him with rapt attention, sitting cross-legged on the ground around him; soon they would remember enough of these stories to start retelling them to others.

Vili tells them the story of Baldr, son of Odin, the most beautiful and beloved of the gods and of the people of Miðgarðr alike, for he was just and generous with his knowledge in healing and runes. One day, he began to dream of his own death, and his mother, Freyja, set out to exact a pledge from all created things in the nine worlds to not harm Baldr; as he was much loved, this was simple. The only object Freyja did not seek out was mistletoe, for she thought it too weak to be worth troubling.

The gods then made a sport of hurling objects at Baldr, for they could not harm him. But the trickster Loki had taken his weakness, and deceived Baldr's blind brother into slaying Baldr with an arrow made of mistletoe. 

“Some shook their heads at this deceit,” Vili says, “lamenting that it was simply Loki’s nature to be malicious. Some say that Loki was taking his rightful revenge for the cruel acts done to his children by Odin. Then there are those who say all such acts of kindness and cruelty are woven long ago into our fates, and that we are only the readers of our destinies. That those who resist fate, only end up hastening it.”

“It is stupid though,” a girl says. “Why could they not talk instead of needlessly killing another? The gods will do anything to trade an eye for an eye, wind each other up for all eternity with lies and death, anything but talk to each other honestly.”

His father appears next to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, that is often a problem,” Hemming says wryly. “For gods and men alike.” To Vili, he says, “Time to begin the ritual, my son.” 

The children get up and circle around him. “We will miss you when you leave, Vili,” one of the boys says, and Vili ruffles his hair. 

“By the time you are ready to come to England with the rest of the clan, you will be young warriors, fully grown. We will fight alongside each other as equals.”

“Uncle Leif says you will be a jarl then. You will have your own land to rule over, and he will be your right-hand man.”

“He says that, does he?” Vili chuckles. “The first thing you should know about your uncle is that every word out of his mouth is a lie. Sometimes I think he is better as a skald than as a fighter, but then I remember he cannot hold a tune.”

His clan is gathered around the statue of Odin, talking in low voices, figures illuminated by moonlight and the flickering light of the torches and candles placed around the clearing. The warriors stand at the front of the circle, dressed in their armor and bearing their weapons. Hemming makes his way through the crowd to the altar to stand beside Alva, their _völva_ , and the _blót_ begins: to the steady beat of a drum, first Alva chants the great rhythmic epic of the creation of the world, as it was once told from a _völva_ to Odin himself. 

_Silence now, children of gods, and heed my tale of the dawn of ages; when all was dark, when there was no sand nor sea, no earth nor sky..._

One by one the animals are led to the altar as the chant continues, and his father ends their lives with a single swift blow to each from his axe. A goat sacrificed to Thor, god of strength and protection; a sow to Freyja, goddess of battle and death; and finally, their finest horse to Odin, the High One, whose presence they are calling upon for war. 

Blood spills from the corpses, staining the earth a slick, dark shine in the flame-light, as Alva ends the chant and Hemming begins the next one. This time these are the words of Odin himself, of his quests and how he came to acquire his powers, made eternal in song. 

_I hung on a wind-battered tree for nine long nights, pierced by a spear and given to Óđin, sacrificed to myself, on that tree whose roots grow in a place no one has ever seen._

The steady drumbeat continues as Alva collects the blood from the sacrifices in a bowl, and then dips the tip of a fir branch into the bowl with her bloodied hands. She rises up and turns to brush the statue and the stone altar with blood, whispering spells as she does so. Incantations he does not know, nor any man, for the practice of runes and _seiðr_ , the ability to dream among the gods and hold the high status of _völva_ was the domain of Freyja (though as there are shield-maidens who fight for Odin, so there are always exceptions to tradition). All this while the great chant goes on, and people in the circle sway to the beat and recite lines of the poem under their breath.

_I learned nine songs from the famous son of Bolthór, and I won a drink of that precious mead, poured from Óđrerir._

A hand touches his arm lightly. Eivor has come up from behind to join him at his side at the front of the circle. He smiles when he feels her presence. Alva is now beckoning forth each of the warriors who will be leaving tomorrow, one by one, as they walk up to kneel at the altar; there she dips her fingers in the bowl, murmuring softly, and brings her hand up to mark their faces in turn with blood.

She gestures last to Vili, and he obeys and comes to kneel in front of her. He smells the sharp metallic tang of the still-warm blood, the smoke of incense and burnt herbs as he closes his eyes and Alva runs her fingers gently down each cheek. He imagines they are streaks of tears, blood tears, trailing down his face.

He steps back and returns to the circle, to where his friends stand, his fellow warriors with their blood-painted faces, and meets each of their eyes in acknowledgement. _We leave tomorrow on a bloody journey, and not all of us will be alive at the end of it._ The expression they give him disquiets him, for it is one of respect, even deference. As they are sworn to his father, they are thus sworn to him, pledged to follow and heed his command should his father be absent. He pushes the flush of discomfort away. They are his brothers and sisters, equals in battle and in life, first and foremost.

Then Vili turns to Eivor and finds her looking at him. 

Fire-light dances in her eyes, those clear, unrelenting blue eyes piercing into his. Her expression is unreadable, and his heartbeat quickens for a reason he cannot name. They have looked at each other innumerable times; he knows how she looks in anger, frustration, sadness and happiness, has come to recognize the precise angles of her lips or the crease of her eyebrows that are all the difference between a shrewd-yet-kind smile or a disrespectful sneer – but this gaze harbors an intensity he does not know. 

Neither of them look away, and the people around them melt away into shadows, the sounds of the chanting and the drums mute themselves in the background. How long has it been, the span of a breath, of several? He is back on the cliff again, watching her, glancing at every fine detail on her face that he had never been quite so aware of before. She is close to him, close enough for him to smell the wood-smoke that lingers on her, and the saltwater spray still in her hair, the spice from the clove-oil soap she uses to scrub her skin clean; beneath it all a lighter scent still, sweet and warm like the faintest touch of honey. They rise up and wrap around him like fingers and urge him closer.

It seems that she is waiting. No, that's not right. Eivor does not wait. She searches, hunts, finds. She is searching for something, but his head is muddling, slow, like he is wine-addled, even as his pulse leaps. Before he can act, or say something, or do anything, cheers and shouts come up from around them; the shadows shift back into people ("Odin!" "To Odin and glory!" they yell, raising their spears and axes to the sky), and the noise slides them back into the world. The chanting has ended, the moment is broken, and they are jostled this way and that as barrels of mead and ale are rolled out, horns and cups are passed around for toasts. A flurry of movement, a series of steps that take him further away from her. Where did she go? 

They are making the toasts now. Someone pushes a cup full of drink into his hand, and somewhere on his periphery he hears his father make the first toast to Odin, and everyone drains their first cup; then a re-filling of the cups, and a second toast; then a third, one for each of the gods they sacrificed to. He isn't paying much attention, still weaving through the crowd and edging his way slowly out of the circle, trying to find Eivor. Some of the villagers and his friends come up to him, try to talk or to grasp his arm, saying words of farewell or affirmation, and he returns them utterly distracted. Where could she have gone? 

A hand grabs his arm; he turns and it’s his father. “Son? Are you alright?”

“I’m looking for Eivor.”

“She’s left with Sigurd and some of her clan, to prepare for a surprise raid I hear.”

“Oh,” is all he manages to say. His heart has not caught up to his head yet, leaping still. The night seems colder, emptier, when he returns to the clearing full of people still drinking. What would he have said to her, or she to him if the moment had not been interrupted?

The question chases him to England.

*

The sea, again. On the fourth morning, the misty banks of East Anglia appear on the horizon, and Hemming calls for the sail to be taken in and the oars brought out. The long ropes creak as the crew furls the sail in, and Vili takes his place on one of the oar sides, where he and the other rowers twist the oars through their holds, drop the wings into the water and begin pulling in long sweeps, surging the boat forward in line with the other ships towards land.

Beside him at the helm of the ship, his father stares out towards the land, to where a high rocky cape unveils itself as they approach through the morning mist. In his hand he holds Isbjörn, the spear he had newly crafted before they left, sleek and polished. Deadly, ready for bloodletting. In the distance Vili hears something that sounds like a howl, or a caterwaul, and he glances up at the cape. 

“Be alert,” his father says calmly. “I believe that is a monastery we are nearing.”

They are following the fleet east of the cape where the monastery is, but Vili keeps his eyes on it as they row past. He sees it now, the images that the skalds and the traders at the taverns so often spoke of, the cluster of great stone buildings covered in vines, with their high arches, smooth columns, and windows of colored glass, the tall spire that reaches like an arrow point towards the skies. 

He also notices two figures, who look almost to be wrestling with each other, struggling towards the edge of the cape. The one being pushed towards the sea is clothed in a black robe, unarmed, while the other is wielding a sword, or a dagger. There are more behind them, he is able to see now, more of those black-clothed figures, monks or priests or their followers, running from and resisting the leather-clad fighters, the sounds of struggle carrying on the wind.

“They are being raided,” he says to his father, momentarily distracted from rowing. Vili watches more closely, as the struggle by the cape’s edge ends. The black-robed man has his throat slit and is kicked off the cape, his body plummeting like a grisly ragdoll down onto the rocks below.

“Father, they are unarmed,” Vili says in a fleeting disbelief he will later remember as deeply naive, “they’re not even warriors.” 

Hemming’s clan followed a long tradition of several other clans in Rygjafylke: their warriors have sworn an oath to slay only those who were armed and raised their weapons against them. The first reason was a matter of honor. There was no honor or reputation to be gained from striking down an unarmed man, much less a farmer or tradesman who cannot fight at all.

The second reason was purely pragmatic. After the taking of a village or a kingdom, its lands would still need to be managed, farmers and merchants and freemen needed to work the fields and trade. Killing every man, making _thralls_ of them, or otherwise instilling a deep-seated grudge against their captors, instead of attempting to make a compromise or peace-pledge with the survivors, utterly depleted the purpose of taking the land and its resources – scarce to begin with in Norway – in the first place.

The warrior standing at the cliff’s edge seems to notice the dragon-headed fleet heading towards land, and Vili sees him raise his sword up at them, as if in salute.

The cold sunlight gleams off the damp blades of the oars as they lift out of the water. “Yes,” Hemming says grimly, “that would be the work of our Danish cousins.”

 _  
_* _  
  
__I know a ninth song: when need befalls me to save my ship afloat, I hush the wind on the stormy wave, and soothe all the sea to rest.  
  
_ _– Odin’s Rune Charms, the Hávamál (Sayings of the High One)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some culture nerd notes: the creation myth story told in the ritual (and at the beginning of the game!) is from the Norse poem _Völuspá_. The story of Baldr is similar to the one Eivor tells in Vinland, which I loved hearing, and the rest of the chant in the ritual is from the _Rúnatal_ section of the _Hávamál_. Danheim does a beautiful musical interpretation of this poem, which I listened to many times while picturing this scene (check it out here: https://youtu.be/ggT7Vj_5um8) that I highly recommend, along with their other music! Very cool vibes that I wish were included in the game a bit more. But I digress.
> 
> Lastly, thank you so, so much for reading, sharing your thoughts with me, and joining me on this ride with these two. 🥰


	4. dauðr

East Anglia, a kingdom of marshes and reeds, buckles at the sight of the several hundred Northmen marching inland from its shores. The villages they pass through on the road to Northwic, where the Ragnarssons and their forces had gathered across the river from days earlier, had all but emptied out at the first sight of their ships; the fields left untended, the forges and cooking hearths still smoking. Within the week, a white flag carried by the king’s herald is sent to the Ragnarssons’ battle encampment with a request to parley. 

“The Saxons are scared of us. No warriors to defend their lands, no walls of any kind. They will bend easily,” Vili’s friend Leif says confidently to him as they stack timber outside the camp. They have been put to work fortifying the camp with a number of Dane and Norse warriors, and are felling trees from the nearby wood, splitting the trunks and cleaving out long wooden stakes to lug back to the banks of the River Wensum to strike up the palisades.

It wasn’t hard to reason why the king was keen on avoiding having to fight the army at all; the Danes had been raiding their lands on and off for generations, their weapons only stayed by the payments of _Danegeld_ , and now the king hoped this massive army that had seemingly appeared overnight could be bought off just the same. “This will be a very short and boring war if all the kings are as spineless as this Edmund is,” Vili responds. He hopes they will raid soon, he is eager to feel the return of the battle-rush, the surety and simplicity of it. The jarls talked of staking out lands to claim for their own, but the thought of settling could not be further from his mind.

When the white flag arrives, the Ragnarssons and the other jarls gather at the war table they have set up at the head of the camp, and naturally, begin to argue for hours. 

Meeting the famed brothers for the first time, watching them talk and interact with their men, it is immediately clear to Vili how they had been able to rouse all of Norway into leaving home to invade England. If it wasn’t on the promise of partaking in a revenge tale to grace the skalds’ tongues for generations to come, then just the mere sight of the three brothers, battle-scarred and energized for war, their arms adorned with silver and gold rings, the utter certainty with which they carried themselves of the roles each of them played in not just their own destinies, but the destinies and glory of all those who followed them – was enough to speak of riches and legend all on its own. _I fought alongside the Sons of Ragnar. We killed scores of Saxons together and quelled England under our heels, once upon a time._

The three men could also not be more different from each other. Halfdan was loud, jovial, quick to anger but also to please; where Ubba stood solid, sure, always observant and level-headed, his brother Ivarr was the opposite, with a swift flaunting cleverness that reminded Vili of a flashy and finely curved blade, one that was whetted by bloodthirst and a lack of pity. 

At the day’s end, when work on the palisades are finished, Vili walks in on them still in discussion. His father, Ubba, and a few other jarls are leaning over the map, moving figures about the outline of Northwic’s perimeter, while Ivarr is sprawled out on a nearby log, sharpening his dagger, and Halfdan sits looking dour on an upturned crate.

Ubba slides a group of figures on the map past Northwic’s walls. "Once we have the king, we can open the other gates and our positioned forces can easily overtake the settlement within the hour. Won’t even need our backup if the king is as weak as the Danes say."

"What then, are we to settle here?" Ivarr says incredulously, "in these forsaken bogs? Are we frogs?"

“We have the king at our knees. We can house our forces here through the winter, and have horses and supplies ready to march once winter thaws,” Ubba says. “Besides, the men need food, and our stores are running out." This was true. In just days after the army arrived on land, their many barrels of flour, salt meat, dried fish, and ale were all already running short. They would need to raid or plunder soon, or replenish their stores otherwise. Whatever the skalds say of war, most of the time it is spent trying to forage enough food to feed the men and the horses, and enough ale and mead to keep everyone tipsily content. A hungry and sober army loses fast.

"Normally I am delightfully in favor of more bloodshed," Ivarr responds, "but I say we hear what this king has to say, nip the riches we can from his mealy-mouthed proffering of _peace_ – ” he scoffs at the word “ – and head straight to pay Ælla a friendly visit. It’s why we came all this way after all. We can worry about playing house after we take land that’s not a sad little swamp.”

When his father and the jarls return from the meeting the next day, the outcome is almost too good to be true: not only does the king give them ample silver in exchange for a pledge to refrain from any bloodshed in the region, he also cedes to their demand for horses and supplies and allows them to spend their winter quarters in East Anglia, provided that they leave just as quietly in the spring. King Edmund had just single-handedly provided the fuel for their war campaign against his own people. Vili wonders what his court skalds ( _s_ _cops,_ he remembers they’re called here) will spin of him when his time comes. 

“He is eager for his farmers to return to the fields without fear and finish their harvest before winter, and wants no trouble from us – especially at his monasteries,” his father says. Edmund was said to be a very pious man of his religion, but from what Vili gleaned, that so often seemed to come with a lack of backbone and sense. Surely he must know they would not leave him in peace forever, even – especially – after such a generous relinquishing of resources and silver. Perhaps he meant to muster more forces then, strategize against them in their peace. Or perhaps he simply prayed. 

In any case, the Ragnarssons keep to their word, and the army marches west to set up winter quarters near Theotford, with their blades sheathed and their hands clean, at least for the moment.

*

The first thing they do is clear and chop the trees to strip them into long wooden planks to build their boats, and in the following weeks, as the forests bare and they awaken to winter frost, the Danes and Norse send many groups of their warriors out by horses or longships to other Danish and Saxon settlements spread all throughout Mercia and Northumbria, even nearing Wessex, for the second most crucial component of warfare, spying. No army marches in winter, so officially, they come and go as traders selling furs and buying fabrics and metal ores throughout England, but they also listen and talk, scout the regions that the warriors will go to in the spring, and catch rumors of the affairs of thegns and ealdormen on the winds. 

Vili gets pulled on these trips often, which he partly suspects is because he is a jarl’s son but also because he has an easier time talking to Saxons without overly intimidating them compared to his rather more aggressive clansmen. Sometimes they get friendly enough with the Saxon traders to spend the evenings drinking together at an alehouse (under the purposes of divulging useful rumors of course) and he and Leif end up rotating round-up duties for the mornings after, depending on who got drunker the night prior, finding and dousing their passed out clansmen with icy river water or prying one or the other from the arms of a sleeping woman or man.

It is all enjoyable enough. But his limbs and muscles, grown stiff from too long in the cold or huddled indoors with little movement, itches to shrug off the furs and cloaks, to feel the grounding weight of a weapon swinging in his hands, to tear through flesh and bone again. Sometimes, a hostile Saxon patrol catches them on their way back to Theotford, and there is a skirmish, but mostly, their blades stay disappointingly clean through the winter. 

They make their seasonal sacrifices to the gods with their fellow Northmen, feast when their stores are plentiful, relay their information of the goings-on of England from the swan-roads to the jarls. The evenings he and his clansmen spend around the fires slowly come to include stories of home as the longing for their old land and the people still there builds with the long dark days. _Do you remember last Yule when…?_

And his mind inexplicably flashes to a face and a pair of eyes, searching for a moment that he had missed and could only wonder at now, a sea away. Sometimes at night, a haze of images comes, lean arms and agile hands reaching out to touch him as they never did in life, and like a dream, goes just as quickly when he wakes. But they are there, that hollow edge that clings to all memories of before, and he does not push them away.

Soon the frozen streambeds thaw, green shoots begin to appear through the hard soil, and the squirrels and rabbits re-emerge lean and scraggly from their burrows, as winter passes into spring and their swords find blood again. 

*

The idea to capture the Saxon fort in the hills of northern Grantebridgescire on the way to Northumbria was Ubba's, but the final decision to do so was that of his _völva_. Ubba was a deeply spiritual and superstitious man, which seemed to be the source of his steadfastness and surety. He would make no final move without consulting his seer, Helke, on his strategy and for reassurance that the portents showed the gods were on their side.

Helke was a distinctive figure amongst the leaders of the army, in her long robes and ornate necklaces of amulets and bones, present at every war-table discussion and at the sides of the jarls, always listening and watching. There were a number of shield-maidens in the army, but she was certainly the only _völva_ , the only one who did not wield a shield or sword to fight in battle, but instead stayed in the shadows, carrying her heavy iron staff with her everywhere.

The roles of the _völvar_ varied from clan to clan – with some only practicing _spá_ , prophecy, or _galdr_ , spells and incantations, or communing with the gods through _seiðr_ and divining the patterns of the past, future, and present by the reading of portents or rune-sticks. Some mastered all three; all had a revered status amongst the Norse, and when a highly regarded _völva_ passed, they were buried with the honors bestowed upon a great warrior or jarl.

Yet the _völvar_ operated at entirely opposite ends to warriors in practically every aspect. Helke spoke in words that contained many turns, every sentence bearing a double meaning and spiraling into points which only she could see. (Once, when Vili was charged with carrying her heavy crates of tools to camp for her, he asked Helke how she decided which portents to discard and which to pay attention to and she had responded with a shrewd smile, "Everything tells me something, but nothing often tells me the most," which perplexed him into silence, and then she added, “Do not worry. To a hammer everything looks like a nail,” which did not particularly assuage him.) She both confused and frightened him, a little.

However, as Ubba’s strength and certainty lay in the gods and he would not make a final move without that reassurance, and only Helke could speak with the gods, so he only listened to her. No one else’s opinion mattered. But it did matter that she listened to everyone else. 

The portents Helke drew from included the usual flight of birds, the patterns of crops and behaviors of animal herds, but also the information retrieved from their Danish and Norse spies – whom she affectionately called her ravens, sent forth by her bearing news from all over, as Huginn and Muninn carried the news and rumors of the world to Odin.

One thing held in common amongst the most trusted and respected _völvar_ : it took a clever and particularly observant woman to read the portents and signs from the gods around them with an unerring accuracy, and Helke was no exception.

And as such, when spring arrived and the leaders of the army gathered in discussion of where in Northumbria to target first – up to Snotingham, where King Osberht was quartering in during the winter, or to Jorvik, where the usurper King Ælla was fighting for Northumbrian control over Osberht? – it is Helke who strings together from the words of her ravens that Ælla and Osberht were embroiled in a civil conflict for power over the region, and were planning to battle each other in the hills east of Jorvik, near Picheringa. 

This would mean that Jorvik would be largely absent of its warriors, perfectly situated for the Great Army to capitalize on if they moved quickly; but that also, on the path there through Grantebridgescire, the Saxon thegns of the land were currently mustering up a fyrd at their fort in the hills bordering Ledecestrescire, to ambush them in battle.

“Do we have the blessings of the gods to take the fort in Grantebridgescire, Helke? Or shall we keep to the rivers and the sea to Jorvik and avoid the fight?” Ubba had said finally, as all heads turned to him. Some grumbles and protests had risen from the jarls who could not understand the concept of avoiding bloodshed. The rumor that Jorvik would be empty of most of its fighting force was a gamble in itself, but Helke’s foresight was infamously precise. The gods, Helke had replied, had already blessed their victory in Grantebridgescire.

So the jarls divide the army in two – Ubba and Ivarr would lead ground forces to meet the fyrd in Grantebridgescire before following the rivers up north to Jorvik, while Halfdan would lead his forces by longship up the coast then through the River Ouse to Jorvik, to take the city while its kings were embroiled in their civil squabble. 

By the time Northumbria had collected its forces again for any sort of concerted attack or to besiege Jorvik to regain control, Ubba and Ivarr would have arrived well ahead of time to reinforce Halfdan, or else be ready on their flanks. It was truly a sign of the gods’ favor, Vili thought, for such a string of circumstances and victories to befall them.

Vili and his father leave with Ubba and Ivarr’s army for Grantebridgescire a few days earlier than the information they have had their traders feed the townsfolk in the region, in order to spring a pre-emptive attack on the Saxon fort. He doesn’t remember much of the lead-up to the battle, only that on the dawn of the attack as they march to the fort, he fidgets constantly with a sweaty grip on his sword and shield, his stomach twisting with that mixture of fear entwined with excitement, that familiar sour stirring before a large battle.

Their army appears from the forest, howling and shouting and striking their weapons on their shields, more than a few hundred war-hungry men and women in armor and fresh from the winter’s peace. They catch the fort entirely off-guard; the Saxon bowmen are hurriedly lining up on the ramparts when Ubba leads his own archers to take them out swiftly, the arrows flying in smooth arcs to their targets on the parapets.

Ubba’s aim is as sure and true as his certainty in their easy victory over the Saxons. He was as good with his bow as he was with an axe, and that was no small feat – wielding a large, heavy bow made of ash or yew, one that was capable of killing a boar or a man at a hundred paces, unlike the bows and arrows children often played with, required great physical strength and constant practice for a steady and strong hand to guide the arrows true, and over the years it takes a hard toll on the bowman’s hands and fingers.

Vili never mastered the bow, nor did he have quite the right hands or temperament for it; he was lethal with a spear, sword, axe, and practically any other object he could pick up, but with a bow he was like most warriors, quite useless. Bowmen were always in high demand and there are never as many in an army as one would prefer to have. The Great Army had a respectable line of archers, but there was only one other warrior apart from Ubba that Vili knew of to be as proficient with their bow as with any other weapon, and she was in Norway.

Ubba led the charge at the northern gates, while Ivarr did the same at the southern gates of the fort. The Saxon thegns must have decided to meet them head-on rather than risk being besieged by the Northmen, because soon their soldiers came streaming out of the gates in ranks to face their army lines. 

Vili gets into his position at the very front of their ranks with his clansmen. “Shields!” he hears their jarls call, and immediately on instinct he raises his own, the wood thumping against his neighbors as their shields overlap, one end on top of the other, in a solid double-layer wall. He crouches so Leif, who always covers him overhead in the shield wall, can guard from his place behind Vili as he readies and angles his sword downward, ready to bring it up under the rim and into flesh on the other side. The Saxon shield wall is advancing towards them, only a few paces away before they lunge; they hold and brace themselves to receive the charge.

A heartbeat before the shields collide. Then the harsh thundering crash, like a dozen hammers striking the anvils all at once, the sounds of men grunting and heaving against their shields. He holds steady on the wall, head tucked in behind his shield-arm, feet grounded firmly in the dirt as the Saxons push and drive against them, watching the flashes of shuffling feet beneath the rim. _Almost._ The sounds of the cramped struggle drown out around him as he focuses, searching and feeling for the right moment to break the wall. 

He hears Leif give a yell above him and a dull thud that must have been a spear or axe burying itself in Leif’s shield as he covers him, pressing into his back. Vili feels the weight shift off him. _Now._ He uses the momentum to raise his shield suddenly, just enough to lunge forward, and stabs his sword up from under the rim of the shield wall into the man on the other end; a strangled cry as the blade finds its mark and plunges into soft flesh. His opponent stumbles, lifting up his shield to protect himself. _Don’t let his cover take his place._ Immediately Vili raises his right foot, puts it squarely on the shield and, still gripping onto his sword, shoves the man back into his ranks, taking his guard down with him as Vili drags his sword out of the man’s bloody thigh. 

He lets out a shout; he has broken through the Saxons’ shield wall, and the line bulges forward with him. Vili straightens in time to see an axe swinging towards him from the right, and meets it with his shield, then in a great sweeping stroke draws his sword clean across the man’s chest before bringing it up through his throat and ripping it back, turning with the force of it to clang his shield against another’s to his left. He throws his weight behind it, charging the third man down as Leif comes up from behind and brings the iron rim of his own shield down on the man, and they flash each other a bloody grin over the body before staggering back up. 

Blood drips down the hilt of his sword, pooling in between his fingers, and the side of his face is sticky and warm, but the nervous tension has dissipated entirely. A powerful calmness had flooded through him when he broke the ranks, and now he feels something else returning: the visceral, painstaking awareness of every movement and body around him but also the _joy_. He is giddy with it, the return of this feeling, this rush. The gods had blessed his sword-arm and shield strength today, and each solid blow that felled a warrior in his path as their line pushed the last Saxons into the fort was like another long ill-fitted lock sliding cleanly into place; the _rightness_ of it, how long has it been since he felt like this?

Then on utter instinct, he looks to his side, as he always did in victory, and sees no one there. _If only you could see this battle today, Eivor._ A fleeting thought. He turns back to join the charge into the fort.

*

They make short work of clearing out the fort. Vili is going through one of the houses, checking the rooms, when he spots the lone Saxon man cowering behind some barrels in the back. He was unarmed, and did not look like a soldier. He might have been a tradesman or a laborer, caught in the fort when they attacked. The man looks up terrified as Vili approaches, eyeing his bloodied sword and shield uneasily, his war-ragged appearance, the flare of bloodthirst still on his face.

“The fort is taken,” he says to the man, stopping at the doorway. “You need to leave here now.” He moves back and gestures out with his shield-arm. “Before they see you.” If a warrior from another clan who held no oath to stay their blade from innocents saw the Saxon, he was as good as dead, and they would make a spectacle of it, and laugh and dance on his corpse afterwards still deep in their victory joy.

The man says nothing and gives him a look of disgust before stumbling up and hurrying past him. Vili stops him with an arm. “Not out the front. Through the side, there. They’ll kill you if they see you. Cruelly.” He receives no response back, only a glare of deepest loathing before he shoves past Vili and runs out the front door anyway. 

He realizes with a pang: the man does not trust him. He should have planned for that. Vili follows after him, to where the man has reached the courtyard and is swiveling around wildly at the smoke and debris of the fort around him, before bending to pull a spear out of a dead body’s grip.

Others from their army have noticed him, and they gather around the courtyard, shouting encouragement at Vili to brutally end the man’s life, as if this were a thrilling, evenly matched _hólmgang_ and anything but the flogging of a dead horse. There was no honor to be reaped here.

Vili sheaths his sword, and showing his open hand, approaches the man carefully as he would a wounded animal. “Put it down,” he says to him in a low voice, “and you will live. I swear it.” _Put it down_ , he pleads in his head, _one last chance to put it down and you’ll live._

The man does not put the spear down, but angles it as if readying to strike him. “Heathen,” he spits. He cannot fight, he is not a warrior, his large calloused hands fumbling with the heavy smooth shaft of the spear as if they are used to wielding a farming scythe or shovel. It is all too easy to step to the side of his clumsy thrust and lunge a hand to grip the spear from out of the man’s fingers, to swiftly turn to drive it up into his rib cage and straight through his heart. A single clean stroke, the same way he would spear a boar in a quick and quiet death.

The man’s eyes turn glassy as his body twitches, and Vili lets him drop slowly with the spear down to the ground. Some sounds of dissatisfaction ripple through the onlookers. “I was hoping for a show,” one of them calls out to him, “but I guess you made him piss all over his pants already.” 

_Heathen_ , the man had snarled at him with hatred in his face. It was certainly an insult, but the word is foreign on his tongue. It must be one of their own, having no common root with the rest of the language they shared. The word echoes in his head as they finish emptying the fort of its corpses and sift through the spoils.

*

The army leaves some of their forces behind to keep the fort (“This will be a useful base should we choose to take Grantebridge in the future,” Ubba had said) and after a night of revelry they continued the march north. Just after they pass the hills and cross the river into Ledecestrescire, they come across a gentle slope of forested land, sheltered beneath a low ridge. He can hear the sounds of a small waterfall and a creek nearby. 

“This would be a fine place for a village one day,” his father says as they approach on their horses at the front of the army. “Fertile, open land, and a good place for a wharf by the river.” Vili notices a family of ravens circling above them as they unpack and set up their tents and fires for the evening by the waterfall. _A home of ravens here. A sign of the gods’ blessings indeed._ Helke had been right again. 

They spend the next couple of nights there, and the Ragnarssons agree: this was a good place for a war camp. They decide to station a small settlement of Danes and Norse here, to start work on building the longhouse and clearing the land; it would be ready for the army to quarter through future winters at. In time, it might very well grow into a proper village.

Ubba motions Vili over in the evening, when he’s relaxing and joking with the other warriors by the fires. “Come here, Hemmingson. I have a weapon for you that I think will suit you.”

He and Ivarr were going through the last of the spoils from the fort battle. Ubba had been inspecting a large double-headed axe, with finely carved grooves braiding through the silver blades and a long dark ashen handle. Ubba offers the axe to him, and waits for him to test a few swings with it.

The axe is heavier than any weapon he is used to, and he is not accustomed to the weapon’s weight being balanced so far from his body, unlike the steady handle and grip of a straight sword blade. He feels it out, angling the axe away, then parallel to his body, then curving it downwards in a few strokes. It was not a quick blade, it had drag, but gods did its shape and weight feel powerful and grounding in his hands.

Ubba nods approvingly as he watches. “How old are you, boy?”

“Seventeen summers.” Vili takes another swing, this time leaving his left arm free as thrusts and pulls the axe back around with his right, admiring its reach and graceful arc. To see it in battle...

“I saw you break the shield wall in the battle. You’re young yet, but strong. Give it a couple battles and it’ll feel like home.”

Hearing Ubba’s praise pleased Vili more than he could say. He thanks the man, and as he turns away with his new weapon, he is met by Ivarr. “Just a moment.” He places a hand on Vili’s shoulder and guides him a little ways from the clearing.

“I noticed your fighting in the fort. A natural you are, instilling terror into those Saxons while leading men twice your age into battle. A pleasure to watch, really. So I have a friendly suggestion for you, my young warrior…” Ivarr sits down on a log and gestures at Vili to join him.

He looks straight at him, his eyes clear and sharp like glass. In others he could see their truest emotions behind their eyes no matter the expression on their face, but with Ivarr, there was nothing. Nothing except a pale cutting stare that bore right through him. “Your hesitation. Drop it.”

“My hesitation?”

“I saw you, with that man. You looked into his eyes, you _doubted_.” Ivarr leans in close. Vili can see clearly now the wide scar that splits down the whole side of his face, the dark skin that has knotted over the seam like a jagged cross-stitch. “Never doubt. You need to become one with your weapon. Even – _especially_ – if you feel yourself doubting, your hand must not stay, your sword must not show it. Your _hugr_ and weapon must be one, iron and will aligned.” He brings his fists together, his eyes never moving, never blinking from Vili’s. 

“You see how your father fights with his spear?” Vili doesn’t tell him that his father didn’t used to fight like that, so mercilessly and cold, not until he had Isbjorn crafted. His father used to attack in careful, well-planned strokes, and he would always stay his hand from an innocent or unarmed man. Perhaps the newfound power of the spear was changing him. Would this axe, gifted to him as a reward for his bloodthirst, do the same to him?

Ivarr takes his silence as affirmation. “Unrelenting, swift, with no room for uncertainty. It is only then that the gods can speak through you, can _act_ through you. You are their weapon. Never forget that, and you will not meet a battle you are not victorious in.”

Ubba appears through the thicket, saving Vili from having to respond. “Quite the teacher these days, aren’t you?” he says to his brother. 

“What can I say?” Ivarr replies as he gets up and gives Vili a clap on the shoulder, “I have a gift for mentoring young pupils.”

*

There are more battles, more shield walls, near Ledecestre and then by Donecaestre, and several skirmishes as they follow the river up north to Jorvik. Each fort or village they capture, they leave behind more Danes and Norse, adding another outpost for Helke’s spies, her faithful ravens, and the promise of another potential settlement to send their people to in the future. 

It is not the type of fighting Vili grew up on; they rarely raid so much as strategically advance through the land, fighting with no tightly knit, small warband that could move and improvise readily on the spot, but rather the coordinated arms of a large force, and it was true war, more similar to a _hnefatafl_ board than anything else he had experienced in Norway. He does not favor the style of the shield wall in these large attacks, the cramped fighting quarters, the smells of the blood, piss, and rotten ale-breath of hundreds of men as they drive their shields into each other.

But they do it again, and again, and the Saxons fall under their heel easily. Especially the fyrds that have been hastily and forcibly summoned by their corrupt thegns and incompetent ealdormen, that are mostly composed not of soldiers, but of farmers and their sons, those men who have never held anything but a pitchfork or scythe in their hands before, armored with nothing but the tattered clothes on their backs. They are no match at all for the Northmen. Some of these battles, it is a massacre. He does not relish it. It helps to be drunk.

War is everything like the skalds say, and nothing close to it. 

But he is good at it. Every victory his axe bears him is a blinding rush of adrenaline that lasts for days, a vicious seething joy, and his fellow warriors celebrate him for it. In the chaos, his hand is true, his breath is steady and his gaze sharpened. It is an exhilarating strange peace that surges through him, like the realignment of countless aching joints all at once, an effortless slip back into well-worn grooves, every precise movement and body around him accounted for simple and true, missing nothing. 

Maybe except for one thing.

One presence that would make it all even better, to turn to at the battle’s end in victory, to fill that hollow yearning space at his side, but he dares not give a name to the thing he dreams of, not yet. 

*

The plan for Halfdan to take Jorvik while the Northumbrian kings were preoccupied with their civil war is another success. He recounts the tale to them when the rest of the Great Army finally arrives in Jorvik, how he and his warriors had waited until the Saxon's day of celebration for their Feast of All Saints to row their ships into the port while the city’s leaders were all in the cathedral. True to Helke’s foresight, the city was few with soldiers and quickly captured with little struggle. 

The Northumbrians make peace with the army, and for the most part, a steady truce holds between the Danes, Norse, and Saxons – no doubt owing largely to the work of Hemming and Trygve, ever the level-headed mediators of disputes between the parties. Their reputation for siding with the Saxons nearly as often as with their fellow Northmen spreads their names through Jorvik and the shires beyond, a sign of hard-earned trust amongst the Northumbrians. 

For Vili, the trust comes even easier – perhaps it was the reputation shed by his father, or his dependable ability to get along with the Saxons without it ending in a brawl, or his glaringly obvious aversion to the politics of this new arrangement and his presumed place in it (and perhaps simply the strange truth of the world that the less you want something bestowed upon you, the more tightly it clings to you) – but wherever he goes, the tensions between their people relax in his presence, open themselves up to intermingling. Then come the midwinter celebrations, and if there is ever a greater unifier than a common enemy, it is drink and merriment, and he leads both with ease.

By the spring, the kings Ælla and Osberht temporarily concede their conflicts with each other and assemble together what remains of their forces, in an attempt to take back Jorvik in battle.

However, the Great Army has had more than enough time by then to get a lay of the land, to take into account the old crumbling stone fortifications around the city and its warren-like streets and alleyways, and have devised a plan that could only be of the Northmen's invention, for it is the kind of war they do best: instead of merely reinforcing the outer Roman walls, they have built another wall within the city across its streets, and when Ælla and Osberht’s fyrd comes, the army feigns flight and retreats back into the city, drawing the gloating Saxons with them straight into their trap. 

They have changed the shape of their battlefield into one that suits their style of fighting more than any open field formation, and this is their killing field. The kings cannot retreat, for Ivarr and Ubba’s forces stream in from behind the gate to cut them off, and they are like hungry wolves preying on a herd of fenced-in sheep. An army exhausted from civil war, that has only ever known battle on open land, pitted squarely against a vicious force of raiders utterly at home with fighting in the close quarters of Jorvik's narrow streets and alleys, splinters bloodily in the rivulets and cracks of the city.

*

King Osberht is lucky, Vili thinks, to have fallen in battle, with a weapon in his hands. The same cannot be said for Ælla, whom Ivarr personally ensures is alive at the end of it all, bruised and bloody, but still breathing. He is brought to his old hall in the city in the wake of their victory, the blood not yet dried from their swords, as a clamor of celebrating warriors follows them. 

With a grim sense of foreboding, Vili takes his place beside his father in the hall, where the jarls and warriors are gathered around Ragnarssons and the king. Ivarr has forced Ælla, battered and pale, onto his throne, as he and his brothers debate the king’s punishment. Ivarr mockingly recites a long list of the king’s misdemeanors, in a spectacle of his own, and the onlookers laugh and jeer along.

Ubba circles the throne slowly. “We have come a long way for you, King Ælla. You know of us, and who we are here to avenge.” 

Ælla mutters something, perhaps the last of his deeply ingrained religious indignation.

"I have felt something," Ivarr says abruptly. "What is it that you Saxons say? A sudden breeze of inspiration? An epiphany?” He bends down by the king, peering up into his sallow, bloodied face.

“You have got quite a pair of lungs in you," Ivarr says, "devoted to such a weak god." 

He smiles and his eyes glitter with malice, as he gets up and plays with his dagger, tossing it in the air, letting it spin before catching it. "Let it be known the Sons of Ragnar have taken your lands and your people from you, avenged the legacy of Ragnar Lodbrok, and that Ivarr Ragnarsson himself was your end." 

To his men, “String him up. Leave his chest and back exposed.”

Ælla’s sickly face blanches, but remains staunch and seething with disgust. "Do your worst, heathen."

"Oh, I daresay I will do my very best, my king.” Ivarr’s tone has turned serious and hard, no longer jesting, as he stares at the king with those unearthly still and unmoving eyes. “Ælla of Northumbria. I’ll carve an eagle free from your chest and deliver you to your god on its blood-wings.”

*

It is chilly on the rooftop. The sounds of feasting and celebration rise up from the hall, but Vili is glad for the bit of peace, having just narrowly escaped being roped into conversation with a group of Northumbrian nobles. There are more Saxons in Jorvik than ever before – with the kings gone, Halfdan Ragnarsson now ruled Northumbria, but he did so through their new puppet king, a former ealdorman named Ecgberht. And soon the thegns and ealdormen throughout Eurvicscire and Snotinghamscire swarm into the city, vying for new partnerships and alliances, re-populating the shadowy corners of the city with their political snake-pits. 

The Ragnarssons’ successful capture and defense of Jorvik is a turning point for the Great Army, which splits in two again: Halfdan, along with the Hemming Clan – much to Vili’s chagrin – and many other Norse, will remain in Northumbria to settle alongside the Saxons, while Ivarr and Ubba plan to march back down south to continue their campaign towards Wessex. By the next moon, he and his clansmen will be settled in their own village, and Vili despairs at the thought of longhouse politics returning; he is already tired of these old men and their petty shire troubles.

He leans back on the roof, feeling the cool breeze wash over him, and notices a raven that has come to perch on the beam beside him. The watchful tilt of its head reminds him of Sýnin, and of his old home, with a pang in his chest that he hasn’t felt for weeks amidst all the gore and political theatre.

“Are you one of Eivor’s ravens?” Vili murmurs, feeling slightly silly for talking to a bird alone on a roof, “come to bring news of England back to her, like a raven of Odin?” 

He turns his head away and closes his eyes, letting out a breath. It has been almost two summers since he left Norway. “Oh, do I have so much to tell you already, my friend.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Culture nerd note time: Ubba the historical figure is notably recorded as having been intensely superstitious, who would consult his seers before deciding on a course of action in battle, an implication I find very interesting because the _völvar_ were almost exclusively women. Archaeology has already shown that Viking women were on the battlefield and there are women with lavish burials found with weapons and armor – but more recent analysis of the grave goods found in some of these burials (specifically iron staffs, symbols of Freyja and _seiðr_ practice), suggests that these burials were extravagant not because the women were of royal status like previously thought, but because they were highly regarded women in battle, a _völva_ or _seiðr_ practitioner to be precise. In one burial, a woman was found with a shield _and_ an iron staff. Badass. 
> 
> It's a super interesting explanation complementary to the shield-maidens that places Viking women in a position of power in battle on par with (or in some aspects, even more important than) the men without requiring them to be outright warriors or uphold masculine ideals. And a highly underrated one at that. The implications of what such women could do or be in these roles of huge influence is so much fun to think about. Anyways, very cool shit.
> 
> On a fic-related note: there will be a trio of chapters on Vili's solo adventures through England. the next should be up later this week :) thank you so so much for reading and for being patient (in retrospect I probably should not have decided to tackle all 10 years of Vili’s time away in this fic...) while we give our boy a lil time to shine before Eivor comes back into his life!


	5. eyða

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> minor spoilers for the Valhalla prequel comics near the end (no need to have read them at all!) :)

Snotinghamscire does not submit quietly to King Ecgberht’s placement on the Northumbrian throne. The thegns who refuse to bend the knee to Ecgberht, and implicitly Halfdan, raise unrest in the shire as Hemming brings his warriors through the valleys and farmlands on their longships. 

One night, they set up camp on a riverbank near their cluster of ships beached on the shore. Vili is sharpening his sword and axe with his clanmates by the fire, half-paying attention as they talk.

“No, I’m serious. They’re scared of bathing,” Leif is saying to Asta, one of the shield-maidens. 

“Are you sure it wasn’t just the inspiring sight of your bare ass that made them blush so?”

“It is a splendid one,” Leif says agreeably. “But why would they be so afraid of a bare ass? Immodesty, they say, and something about a devil. Unfamiliar words. Perhaps Saxons are just scared of seeing their own bodies. Gods, I don’t know what’s worse.”

Vili scrapes the stone down the sword blade. Days ago, before the Ragnarssons had departed Jorvik, intending to take Snotingham before launching their assault on King Burgred’s forces in Mercia, Ivarr and Ubba had offered him a place under their banner. “We could use a warrior like you,” Ivarr had said with his confident wide grin, “If you tire of the Picts up here and want to turn your blade on Saxons, you know who to find. Just look for the trail of bodies and slain kings. With us, there will be fighting and glory you’ll never find up here in this barren land.”

He almost wished to go with them. But the next day he had watched longingly as their raven banners marched south, and he turned towards the future. Now he thought of them again, wondering where he might be had he not been tethered to his father’s side. 

“What do you think, Vili?” Leif says. 

“What, of your ass? Never given it much mind, aside from worrying about having to save it all the time."

“Watch it, or the next shield wall we’re in you’re going to have an uncovered ass of your own."

“I think,” Vili says more seriously, setting down his sword and reaching over to pick up the axe gifted to him by Ubba, “that you two need to get it over with and bed each other already. Asta, he's not going to get any more observant than this. You’re going to have to accept his flaws.”

“That was entirely not what I asked,” Leif says, averting his eyes from the shield-maiden as Asta laughs. 

A call from the watch outside the camp alerts them. They get to their feet immediately as other warriors emerge from their tents. “Must be Saxons nearby,” Leif mutters as Vili picks up and tosses him a sword. Only a few moments later and soldiers appear from the undergrowth, bristling with torches and blades. 

As their warriors run to meet them, he notices a few of the soldiers veering off to where their ships are beached on the shore, wielding their torches. “The ships,” he shouts at his clansmen, and heads straight for the shore. The Saxons are torching their ships and supply stores as he, Asta, and Leif rush down the banks, at the same time a large man armored in mail turns from his ravaging crew and comes towards them. “Get the fires out,” he says to Asta and Leif, “I’ll deal with him.” Leif pivots his shield around to its other side and uses it to scoop sand from the shore to throw on the fire while Asta advances on the nearest Saxon.

Vili scans over the man quickly as he approaches, half-lit by the torches and fires on the beach. Well-armored, with his sword held out to his left and shield up as he comes steadily towards him. An experienced soldier. From the quality of his armor and weapons, he must serve one of the hostile thegns. A gust of chilly wind reminds Vili starkly that in their haste, barely any of his clansmen were wearing armor, including him.

And he doesn’t have his shield. He must seem an easy target, Vili thinks, a lone young warrior offering himself up at first glance. He might as well be fighting naked. _Good thinking, Hemmingson._ Vili decides to brazen it, twisting his sword scabbard back across his right hip and readying his axe with both hands as he walks towards the Saxon with more confidence than he feels, until they’re several paces away from each other, then he breaks into a run, lunging towards the sword on the left with his axe, and at the very last moment, swerving hard to his right just past the man, then instantly ducking low to the sand as he feels the blade swing just over his head. 

Then as the man is still turning, he thrusts back up with his axe into his chest, but the man is quick, a warrior’s reflexes, and meets his blade with his, the sound of metal on metal like the resounding crack of a bell, the force of it vibrating up his arm. Vili leaps back a couple paces and catches his breath before lunging again, hoping to feint and draw the man towards him, to reveal an opening for him to strike; but his foot sinks in the sand and he slips slightly as he steps to the side, and the Saxon’s blade sings past his cheek, grazing the bone. He re-centers just in time to fend off the second sword swing with a clang. 

The Saxon follows up with a strong charge of his shield, and because Vili had expected it, he is just barely able to dodge the heavy iron shield-boss from smashing into his shoulder, darting back another few paces. _Need to find an opening._ This time he pays attention to his footing in the sand, and feints another lunge forward again, breaking hard to the side as the Saxon instinctively raises his sword to parry, and bringing up his long-handled axe to swing it in a full arc around at the man before he can bring his shield around. 

His axe doesn’t cut through the mail, but the sheer force of the swing is enough to knock the soldier off-balance, his heels slipping in the sand, and immediately Vili unsheathes his sword with his left hand and stabs forward into the man’s chest, piercing through the mail, dark beads of blood oozing between the metal ringlets. He twists and then wrenches the sword out of the clinging flesh as the man, trying to regain his balance, lurches backwards and Vili plunges the sword again, this time into his exposed neck. He wrests the sword free and steps back, watches as the Saxon warrior drops his sword and shield onto the sand to bring his hands up to his wounds, trying to staunch the blood as he falls to the shore. 

His death is near now, both of them know. Vili gives him one last glance before leaving the twitching body on the beach and finally turning back to the ships. Leif, Asta, and a few more clansmen who had arrived during the fight were able to save their ships from burning past repair, but their supply stores are gone, leaving only charred piles of debris on the shore.

The last few soldiers try to escape through the brush. Stirring with anger at the surprise attack and loss of their supplies, Vili and his clanmates follow them through the undergrowth to a village. The village is mostly abandoned, few items remain in the houses, but they pillage what they can anyway and set the thatch roofs on fire. His clansmen strike down the last of the soldiers, and Asta captures a fleeing villager, knocking him down on his stomach and digging a foot into his back as she presses her sword-point into the Saxon’s neck, prodding and intimidating him for the whereabouts of the thegn whose land they were on. The man relents, and true to her word, Asta lets him up and watches the man straggle away.

They return to the remains of their camp, strewn with Saxon bodies, the air still heavy with smoke from the burnt debris, as dawn breaks above them. His father meets them when they arrive, grasping Vili’s shoulders and drawing his eyes over the deep cut where the Saxon’s sword had slashed his cheekbone. “Son. The last of the soldiers are dead?”

Vili nods and lets Asta inform him of the thegns they must kill in order to quell the land. Hemming listens, then gathers the clan around to address them. At the end, he says, “Kill those who raise a weapon against you, but leave the rest. Take no one as _thrall_. No matter who rules over them, remember these are farmers and laborers whose lands have been ravaged by war for many seasons. Come winter, they will yield, and we will have to unite to survive in these harsh lands. We will need each other then." 

A series of raids and fights follow through the shire as his clan tracks down the last of the dissenting thegns, that end with his father clearing the contestation around his jarldom and settling the matter once and for all, by the simplest law of men: drawing the _hólmgang_ square between him and the opposing thegn, a duel witnessed by both the thegn’s people and his clan. The price was great if his father lost – the thegn would effectively have become the jarl and ealdorman of the shire in one swoop – but aided by the swift, deadly spear-point of Isbjörn, his father’s hand never wavered, and he never lost.

All that was left was to build a home. Their scouting parties leave and return with scant suggestions; his father refuses to take a Saxon village, but the land that hasn’t already been settled or farmed is rocky, arid. _Not close enough to the river for our ships and traders. No land for our farmers. We can make it up the hill just fine, but what about our elderly and children?_

Then one day their scouts bring the clan to the rubble of an old farming settlement at the end of a river inlet, surrounded by deep valleys and mountains, and Vili feels a calm settle over his father as they look out over the land from a clifftop. _Here._ His father and Trygve immediately start work on building the docks, homes, and a longhouse, with plans to call an Althing for the thegns of the shire as soon as it was completed, to invite them and their people to the village. Hemthorpe. Where Saxon and Norse could not only coexist respectfully, but prosper.

Soon, they face battle with a new enemy, one familiar to the Northumbrians and less so to the Norse. In warring with the Picts, defending their villages and lands together from the raiders, Hemthorpe's residents find both a useful diversion from the difficulties of village-building and a common enemy that unites far more effectively than any compromise. 

When Saxon settlements are overrun by Picts, the refugees stream into Hemthorpe, and his father takes them in. When winter comes, cloaking the hills and mountains in snow and leaving the world silent and white, even more Saxons come, and his father welcomes them all. “You have seen much strife and known little peace, your children even less,” he says to the men, women, and children as they gather around the hearths in the longhouse, their bodies pallid and thin from the meager harvest season, the civil strife, the casualties of war. “Let our differences be left behind at the gates, let the threads lie where they have been woven. We are here together now. That is what matters.”

*

The inevitable disagreements soon come in spades. His father attends to them daily at the longhouse, sitting in judgment often for the better part of the day. Disputes over field markers, trading agreements, the handling of religious customs. Sometimes after Vili returns from a long day out riding in the shire, an excursion solely planned to escape having to be present through the longhouse judgments, the same villagers that he saw before leaving that morning are still there, his father still patient in his seat, still listening. 

Today, the dispute is between a group of clerics from their parish close to Hemthorpe, and two of their clansmen, Halvar and Latham. The clerics insisted that the warriors had pillaged their church months ago, taking a stash of silver cups and plates, a bag of coins and a bronze crucifix of Christ, and now that the clerics had returned safely to the church, they wanted those items back. 

Halvar and Latham had protested, saying it was so long ago that they could not find all the items again, that before the clan settled the land, the church had belonged to the thegn, and now the thegn was dead, and so the rules of ownership did not hold. “It is not _our_ property,” a cleric begins heatedly, just as Halvar mutters that they had already hacked the crucifix to bronze pieces, finding no other use for it, to the outrage of the clerics, before Hemming cuts across them all with an even voice and tells Halvar and Latham that they will return what they plundered, and for what is missing, the men will have to hand over from their own possessions items of equal worth; this meant their coveted silver and gold arm-rings, which does not please the warriors in the slightest. However, the jarl's decision is final, and the warriors leave the longhouse that day grumbling.

It is not the only day to end as such. His father is merely evening the scales, he understands, for after all it is the Saxons who have been conquered, their land taken, their way of life infringed upon, but to his clansmen it goes against their traditions entirely. The discontent grows and spreads through the clan as it appears to them that their jarl is now regularly siding with the Saxons over his own people. 

Mutterings behind his father’s back, and Vili’s, as he passes them on the streets, a feeling he is so entirely unfamiliar with – a preemptive prickling at the back of his neck when he turns and catches sour-faced men and women throwing bitter glances at him, the immediate bubbling of indignation, frustration, or exasperation, or all three, at a matter that was out of his control, yet he stays silent – that the strangeness of it doesn’t catch up to him until some time later. It rankles. 

The feeling also sticks, he discovers. The discomfort at the thought of being resented, disliked by his clansmen etches itself into him far more deeply than he thought could have affected him. _Don’t let it get to you_ , some of his sympathetic warriors would say, _they’re just complaining, it doesn’t mean anything, we know you’re not your father._ Said supportively in the daylight, or by the warmth of a fire, the words are consoling enough. But remembered at night, when the rest of his clanmates have gone to sleep in the barracks and he lies awake, alone, they turn hollow and cold. Would he always be tied to his father’s role and his decisions, his legacy? 

_I wish you were here, Eivor. You would know how to make sense of this._ He thinks of the Ragnarssons again and their offer, of doing nothing else but fighting and drinking alongside the best of the Danes and Norse day in and day out, and of the last time he had felt that low hum in his veins, the battle-joy that the skalds so often spoke of, the lure of sword-song. And perhaps he just misses home, a place that is not this troubled and discomfiting land.

*

Such mutterings did not go away with time, and his father’s patience and reason were no longer enough to pacify his clan. As the winter went on, the disputes grew and Saxon and Norse found more reasons to quarrel with each other. 

Vili rarely saw his father anymore. At first he thought it to be exhaustion from the tedium of sitting through judgements all day, and though his father’s composure remained calm and his judgement fair, he drew his boundaries tighter, spent less time engaging in conversation with the other villagers when it wasn’t immediately pertinent to an issue or goal. The atmosphere in the longhouse is tense, rigid at all times now. It had never been like this in Norway, and Vili is unsure what to make of it. He didn't know what went into re-building a shire from the ground up. Perhaps this was its cost.

So Vili busies himself in the village. Their clan is readying to send back several ships to Norway in the spring, to bring workers and families to Hemthorpe, despite the bubbling tensions among its residents. He heads to the shipyard just outside the barracks, where stacks of oak are waiting to be split and shaved into the long smooth planks they’ll use to build their boats. He’s always found something reassuring about the repetitive motions of splitting the trunks, right along the wood grain into halves, then quarters, then eighths, something about the smooth strokes of an axe cutting into something solid and unmoving, that’s not skin and bone. It takes his mind off everything else happening around him, so he spends a lot of time here.

He smiles slightly when he sees the two young Saxon boys, Osric and Sigberht, hanging around the training grounds by the barracks. They had come to Hemthorpe with their mother after their father had died fighting in Mercia. Brothers, who looked so alike that they could be twins, with their long fair hair and wide, guileless eyes, who had come up to the barracks one evening and declared to the clan warriors that they wanted to join them. That had gotten a good chuckle from the warriors. 

But the boys were persistent, and if there was anything the Norse respected, it was fighting spirit. Their father had been a thegn’s soldier, the boys had said, so they knew how to fight, a little. _Aren’t you worried about having to kill Saxons_ ? one of their warriors asked, to which Sigberht, the more cautious and attentive of the two, replied, _It was a West Saxon who killed our father. We don’t care about spilling Saxon blood. We are Northumbrians first._ So Hemthorpe took in its first new warriors in England. 

Vili invites them onto the training ground while he is splitting the trunks, watching the boys go through the basic forms they had learned on the training posts. They were older than the usual age when Norse children first began to train, but they could make good fighters yet. Seeing promise, he sets down his axe and goes over to them, hopping the fence and picking up a shield from the weapon rack, before gesturing the brothers over. 

"Here's something you can work on together.” He faces them in the middle of the yard, holding the shield, and says to Sigberht, "Aim a strike at me." 

The boy eyes the shield disbelievingly. "But you’ll just block it." 

"Now that's no attitude to have," Vili tells him. "Just swing your blade at me, Sigberht. I assure you I will try not to get wounded." 

He obliges, bringing an upward stroke from his low guard. The boy is shorter so the angle is wrong, the swing is hesitant and weak – a lesson for another time – but it serves its purpose. Vili brings up the shield to block it, then holds still. "Good. Now, look, as soon as Sigberht strikes, I raise my shield up, and then what happens?”

Osric, catching on, steps forward to mimic a cut from below, swinging low at his exposed leg.

Vili nods. “Your partner makes the enemy raise their shield, or deflect a blow, or move backward, and you take advantage of the holes it makes in their defenses. Not every stroke has to be one to maim or kill as it might be if you were fighting on your own. It just has to be something your partner can follow up with and complement. That is your advantage.”

They rehearse the series of steps again, with Sigberht making the forward strike and Osric aiming for his leg, and this time Vili raises the shield then brings it quickly down to deflect Osric’s swing. “Don’t rely on the same moves every time. You need to work together to anticipate each other's movements, not merely your opponent's. One takes a blow, the other uses the moment of distraction to hit them from their blind side. One feints, the other strikes. Your enemy will have to do the work of thinking for three minds instead of two."

He has them go through their basic strikes on him, pausing in between moves to point out the common openings in his defense. Of course, this would change if their opponent was also armed with a sword and not just a shield, and all rules would break instantly when put in a shield wall...but this was a start, he thinks with a note of pride as the boys seem to catch on quickly and work naturally together. Perhaps they’d be able to make strong warriors out of these Saxons after all. 

“In battle, it will go much faster and you will not always have time to understand each other’s movements. Give it time, and you won’t even need to think or speak, you will fall together as one without even trying.” Vili walks over to the water trough and fills up a skin, then tosses it to them. "I'll have Bjarke teach you the rest of the basic cuts later," he says. "He taught me my very first dozen moves when I could barely even hold up a greatsword. I have him to thank for letting me practice behind my father's back." 

He smiles fondly at the memory, then looks over to see a perturbed look on Osric's face. "Don't worry, Bjarke can be a cranky old fool at his age, and make no mistake, he has no great love for Saxons, but you will be warriors for the clan now. He's the best you could have fighting at your side." 

Osric's expression twists as if he is withholding something while Sigberht looks determinedly at a point past Vili's shoulder. 

"What is it?" 

"Not s’pposed to say," Osric mutters. 

Vili stares at him. He feels the prickling at the back of his neck again. “Come on, out with it,” he says sharply. 

"Bjarke and Eluf," Sigberht replies, "they've been saying things, you know, about Hemming Jarl. For a long time now. They went to talk to him this morning." 

"Ah," Vili says, relaxing slightly. "Yes, I know they've been grousing a bit. Entirely expected of them, old-timers that they are. Their blood is not meant to settle alongside anyone outside of our clan for so long. It’ll be alright. My father will listen to anyone who comes into his hall." 

"Well...they got real angry last night. Riled up all the warriors at the alehouse."

An uneasiness stirs in his gut. “They didn’t go _just_ to speak to him, did they?” The brothers’ silence is answer enough. Without another word, Vili leaves for the longhouse.

There is a small crowd in front of the longhouse, that swells with Saxon villagers and clan warriors as Vili gets closer and more people come out of the hall, looking distressed and agitated. He makes his way through the crowd up to where Leif and Asta are standing, and sees Bjarke and Eluf speaking to the warriors who have gathered in front of them while his father and Trygve stand behind the men.

“You have seen reason on this matter before. It is not different this time,” Hemming is saying.

“Once the rest of our families and people come, will they want to live in a Saxon village?” Bjarke snarls, turning his grizzled face on Hemming. “We promised them a new land, for _us_. Not Saxons for neighbors and at our feasting tables. _You_ promised us that.” Some of the warriors raise their voices in agreement.

“What the other jarls may have promised when we started this journey, I cannot say,” his father responds, stepping forward to meet the faces of the villagers. “I do know that I promised to find us a home, and that,” his father sweeps his gaze slowly around at the people, then coming to rest on Vili, “is _everything_ I have been working towards.” He glances back to Bjarke. “We have fought and bled alongside each other for countless seasons together. Do not let it end in this way."

Bjarke exchanges a look with Eluf. It is the expression of men whose minds have been made up long ago. "Then you know I can never stand true for this, my jarl,” he says. “You wish for us to value Saxon blood as equal to the blood of our kin. Each time you promise that peace is coming, but I see no peace, only more fighting, of a different kind. I see no home for our clan here. No home for _me_ here. I can no longer continue to follow your judgment to a distant future that only you can see."

"And you wish to do better than me?” Bjarke gives a stiff nod. A saddened acceptance on his father’s face, as if this was an outcome he had foreseen and though unwillingly, already made peace with. “Then as your jarl, I accept your challenge. We draw the square."

Vili pushes forward past the crowd (“Stay out of it Vili,” he hears Leif hiss as he feels Asta try to grab his arm) and when he reaches Bjarke he shoves at him, sending the warrior back a couple steps. "What are you doing, Bjarke?” he demands, “there is no need for this!" 

Eluf attempts to pull him off to the side. “Vili,” he mutters, “It is done, let it be.” Vili ignores him, shaking off the man’s grip. "Bjarke, Eluf, stop this. This is my father. You do not need to fight him to say your piece." 

"We are past that, Vili!" Bjarke growls, coming up close to him. The man is larger, but they are the same height and their eyes meet levelly. "This has been a long time coming, you cannot blind yourself to these things forever. Take some advice. Don't be like your father. He has abandoned his own blood in favor of weak men and their weaker god." 

Hemming comes to his side, holding out a hand between them. "Vili, do not get involved. This matter has been decided already."

"Father," Vili turns to him heatedly, "we do not need to kill our own." 

"No.” Hemming gestures an arm out to the villagers and warriors who have surrounded them, watching, murmuring and anxious. "These are _all_ our people, whether they come from Norway or not. We are all under one clan now, and if anyone dares to challenge their jarl over the leadership of the clan, then we draw the square. That is what has always been done, and it will not change now." 

Vili stares at his father's face, distant and immovable. It was like shouting into the wind. Could he not reason with them, was there really no alternative to killing one or the other? He tries again, desperate. "We do not need to resort to killing each other.”

Hemming closes his eyes for a moment, then when he opens them again and speaks, his tone is gentler, slower, but as if they take a great effort to bring out. “This has long been out of our hands, Vili. Bjarke has told you as much, and I have tried my very best to not make it be as so. If I have failed there, then I will bear the consequences, but I cannot decline a challenge to my rule. Step aside, now." 

Another hand on his shoulder. He recognizes it as Trygve's. “Vili, there is nothing more to be done,” he says to him quietly. He shrugs it off furiously, refusing to move. 

"What if you fall?" Vili says finally to his father, the slightest flicker of fear in his voice.

"Then I fall." That calm acceptance again, the steady tone. He cannot stand it.

Vili gives one last despairing look at his father, at the men who are so compelled to fight to their deaths over this rift, men he grew up with and learned from, and considered as close to family as anyone could be in the clan. He already knows none who challenge his father will survive Isbjörn, not when all the spear has ever known has been victory. 

His eyes fall on the spear in his hand. What had Ivarr described his father as with Isbjörn? Unwavering, resolute. But in return…. 

_You were not like this in Norway,_ he thinks, _before you held Isbjörn in your grip. You wield its power too easily, like your reasons for doing what you think must be done for the people, no matter the cost. It has changed you. I will not let it change me._

*

Vili watches half-heartedly as the pieces move on the _hnefatafl_ board.

This morning he and his clan, and even some Saxons, had buried Bjarke's body with his shield and weapons in the cold earth just outside Hemthorpe, lining stones around the burial mound when they were finished. Hemthorpe’s first grave. Eluf had left the clan permanently after the _hólmgang_ and went south to join the Danes in Mercia. 

Feeling no desire to speak to his father, Vili had avoided the longhouse for as long as he could, until Trygve insisted he come up for a game or two. He keeps his eyes determinedly away from his father, who is reading reports by the fire, but he is barely paying attention to Trygve’s movements on the board until suddenly, it is his turn and he realizes that his king is already surrounded on three sides.

“Another feint you’ve fallen into,” Trygve says. “Your thoughts are elsewhere, clearly.”

Vili doesn’t speak, still seething with frustration and resentment at his father. He stares pointedly down at the board. It wasn’t just the clash with Bjarke that embittered him. Perhaps Bjarke was right, there could be no true home here for both his clan and the Saxons. Some differences just could not be smoothed over, no matter how uplifting his father’s speeches to them were. But he holds his tongue. 

“Vili,” his father begins, looking over at them from the fire.

“Why would you kill one of your own over these Saxons?” The words come out angrier, sharper than he expects.

Hemming doesn’t say anything for a moment. He sets down the scroll he is reading and turns to face Vili fully. "There are no Saxons or Norse here, Vili. If we are to survive what is to come beyond just the next season, the next war, if we are to raise our families and children here, there must be only one people, and they must be treated as such from the very beginning. No matter the differences we have, the difficult choices it brings us that we must bear. We must set the example." 

He wants to protest that the Saxons did not want to be Norse, and the Norse detested the Saxons, had the blood of countless of their kin on their blades. Some rifts were too deeply cut to gloss over. To do so would do both sides injustice. “Does it not bother you? Killing Bjarke?” 

“Do you think I carried that out lightly?” 

The honest answer is _yes, because you have changed._

As if hearing his thoughts, his father says, "These are hard decisions we make not for ourselves, but for our people, for the hurt and suffering we can avoid in the future through it. It is a heavy burden to carry, we cannot escape that. But the face we must wear in front of our people, for their sake, must be one of certainty, of conviction, no matter the doubts we harbor inside.” His father leans in towards him. “You must understand this, if you are to lead your people." 

"I am not a jarl."

"But you will be." 

"It didn’t used to be like this,” Vili mutters. “You’ve changed, father.”

"We all change," his father says, at last letting the barest hint of impatience tinge his voice. “ _You_ must change." 

Vili wants nothing more than to yell, or to throw something, to provoke his father into showing any other feeling on his face than this implacable, mild-mannered and distant mask he wore. 

He stands up abruptly. “I will not change.”

*

“I thought I would find you up here.” 

Vili is at the top of one of the watchtowers overlooking Hemthorpe, leaning against the wall, staring absently out towards the river where the moonlight trailed pale silver on the dark rippling surface. He doesn’t respond to or move at the sound of Trygve’s voice. He hears scuffling and steps as Trygve climbs up the last few rungs of the ladder and comes to join him at the railing.

“You left quickly,” Trgyve says. “But I wanted to talk to you alone.”

Vili turns to him. “If it’s about how my father is right and I should be – ”

“You may not be able to see it easily, but Bjarke’s death weighs heavily on him.” Trygve shifts to rest one arm on the bannister, looking up into Vili’s face. “He lets few see the change, least of all the people of the village, but to ignore the scars would be the greater injustice done to Bjarke’s memory. We do not wish for that, and neither does your father.”

“If his mask weighs too heavily on him, then I cannot see it, nor can I see past it. Perhaps I never will.” Then Vili adds in a bitter afterthought, “Just like it was with my mother.” He looks away from Trygve. “His _hugr_ is as unbending as stone. So why does it waver now, after the deed has been done?”

“Because he is a good man, with a conscience that haunts him. He has been trying to reason with Bjarke and the clan for a long time now. You know that, and you know that he could not turn down a challenge to his place as jarl. We fight for what we stand up for, but reap its price in blood...and your father is such a man who does not wish for those stains to be washed away. However differently he shows himself to the people.” 

They watch as some drunken villagers stumble out from the alehouse onto the silent empty streets. Trgyve continues, “It is a heavy price, to kill one of your own, who in that same instant you would sacrifice your life for without question on the battlefield. To have it be done in the name of the clan that you both love and fight for. It is not an enviable position.”

Could he ever shoulder such a weight? For as much as Vili wished himself to be nothing more than simply a warrior of the clan, he could not. He would never be just a warrior, would never be severed from his father’s role and his place in the clan, nor be blissfully ignorant to the labors of leadership he witnessed. Those loose ends that no one else could see, he would always see. Perhaps that was also the burden of a child, to silently notice every minute fault and blindspot of their parents as they grew older. _To ignore the scars would be the greater injustice done_.

He meets Trygve’s eyes, ever steady and encouraging, and notices for the first time the wrinkles and lines on the aged man’s face. When had that happened? When had he grown so much taller than Trgyve, that now he has to tilt his head down to meet the man’s eyes? In his mind he is still the young boy forever endeavoring to skirt Trygve’s constant presence, basking in the affectionate reproving tone or lighthearted chastisement of a chore skipped or a prank well-executed. It was always a given, his presence. As was his role as his father’s adviser, the one who saw and accounted for all the cracks and shadows of doubt in the jarl’s mask, for if not him, then who else?

 _Here is another man_ _who gives more of himself to others than anyone in passing can see,_ _and not even he seems to know it_. It lent his words more weight than he knew. 

Vili drops his shoulders, slumping down slightly onto his arms on the bannister. “I did not understand before.” 

“And now you do. A gift, as well as a burden, to know it. But it is worth it, I think.”

*

“How does it look?” 

A wince as the salve is gently massaged onto her wound.

“Be still, Eivor.” 

“Randvi, I can barely do anything else,” she says in a muffled voice, her cheek pressed into the pillow, facing the wall of the longhouse as she lies on her stomach. “Is it as bad as it feels?”

The pain had barely been noticeable in her rush down the mountain to defend Stavanger from Kjotve’s surprise attack, but now in the quiet loft under the warm hearth-light, the throbbing ache from the dagger-wound – inflicted just below her left shoulder blade – pulses like a hundred knife-points piercing through her back, and is almost unbearable. Almost.

“You mean just your wound, or your entire body?” Randvi replies in her gentle chiding voice, “because to be truthful, you look like you just spent a week in the mountains and got dragged around and beaten to near-death.”

“You have an uncanny gift for augury, Randvi,” Eivor murmurs into the pillow, “perhaps it is you I should be seeing for guidance and not Valka.”

She hears the light tap of the salve jar being set down, and feels Randvi’s hands press cloth onto the cleaned and medicated wound. “Now, are you going to tell me what happened? The version you gave Styrbjorn was not nearly exciting enough to be the whole story.”

“I suppose I didn’t include enough of me getting dragged around and beaten to near-death for it to be genuine?” Eivor struggles up onto her side just enough to help Randvi wrap a longer strip of cloth around her chest and back to keep the dressing in place. 

“In the interest of truthfulness, of course.”

“Of course.” Eivor smiles, though Randvi can’t see it. She lifts her arm up as Randvi guides the bandage around her body once, then twice. “You remember the skald I brought back for Styrbjorn? It is a long story, but she was freed.”

“And you got stabbed in the back in the process?”

“Something like that.”

Eivor turns her head just enough to catch Randvi giving her a look that makes it clear she knows it certainly was _not_ like that, but that she has chosen to let it go. 

“Yes, I remember the skald, Gull? A _thrall_ with a name that means ‘goddess’? Well, you always did seem to have a penchant for following intriguing women into dangerous circumstances.”

Eivor laughs. “It wasn’t like that. She had a...strange quality about her. Perhaps a goddess really did speak through her.”

“Guiding you as Loki would to the golden apples of Iðunn’s orchard, no doubt.” Randvi finishes wrapping the dressing and lowers Eivor slowly back onto her stomach. 

“Do not tell me you wouldn’t be tempted either,” Eivor says as she rests her cheek back on the pillow and sighs with some relief. The salve helps; the pain has dulled a little, leaving her thoughts clearer.

“So all this time, when I thought Kjotve had forgotten our blood feud, he has been plotting to take our lands and draw me away from Raven Clan. I only wish he himself had been in Stavanger that night so I could tear his throat out then and there.”

Randvi says nothing, so Eivor continues, her voice lowering as she fixates on the dark splintering grooves of the wood grain on the wall, “I wonder if I haunt his dreams as much as his actions have haunted mine. How he murdered my parents that night, how I am coming after him, the fear of knowing that his end is near because of me. I hope the gods give me that much.”

“Eivor,” Randvi says, trying – and failing, she has never been very hard to read, even if Eivor can’t see her face – not to sound alarmed, “No one knows what a twisted mind like Kjotve’s can be thinking at all, and you should not dwell on those thoughts. They will eat you alive, and that is what he wants. For you to chase the ends of the world to find him, to exhaustion. To your death.”

“The dreams are getting stronger, Randvi. They are all I can see at night. His ugly, gloating face laughing at my parent’s dishonor. _My_ dishonor. I can feel it, my fate to meet him in battle. I know my time is coming to end him.”

“There are things more important than reputation,” Randvi says, her voice stern now, “like your clan’s lives, _your_ life...”

“Kingdoms die, kinsmen die, you and I must also die,” Eivor recites petulantly, saying the words that every Norse knew by heart, “but there is one thing that never dies – ”

“ – the honor and fame of one who has earned it, _yes_ , Eivor, I understand, but that does not matter if you are dead; or worse yet, if you are already acting as if you are dead.”

_You do not understand. You have not been a warrior for many winters now, you –_

Randvi says firmly, “Do not say aloud what you are thinking right this very moment.”

Eivor glowers silently at the wall, her mind still whirring with anger, her back stinging painfully again. 

“If it is your fate, it will come. But for you to go out every raid to chase him down...it is only burning you out. It is a waste of energy, and everytime you come back empty-handed and hurt. Ever since Sigurd left on his trip, you have been nothing but angry and reckless, all the time.”

“You think that if Sigurd were here, he could talk me out of it?”

“No, he most certainly could never talk you out of anything. But the Eivor I met all those summers ago would never have so recklessly taken an unpledged village on her own, on behalf of Styrbjorn without his knowledge, she would not have put her clan in a position to be overwhelmed by Kjotve’s surprise attack, and she would _never_ have taken a _thrall_ from Kjotve under the name of Raven Clan, no matter what glory she promised. That is not the Eivor I know.”

Each accusation like an arrow to its mark, burrowing all the more deeply because she knew them to be true. Eivor twists onto her side, wrenching her sore, beaten body around so she can face Randvi fully in the hearth-light. 

“Are you here to scold me then, Randvi? I made a choice and have already paid for it with Tora’s life, is that not enough?” Her breath is ragged, her eyes flashing with anger. 

Randvi is silent for a moment. “You are trying to goad me into saying something both of us will only regret. I will not let you do that.” 

Pulling on her blankets hard, Eivor heaves herself onto her other side so she does not have to look at Randvi. The sudden movement sends the white-hot pinpricks searing through her back, her wound thrumming with fresh pain, warm and wet again beneath the dressing. Her palms are cold and sweaty, her fingers numb despite the warmth of the loft.

“Leave me alone now, please.”

“You’re bleeding through your bandages again. Let me – ”

“ _Randvi_.”

She can feel Randvi’s eyes still on her, as she squeezes her eyes shut and grits her teeth against the pain. Randvi’s hand touches her shoulder gently; she lets her do that. 

Randvi says softly, “I am glad you came back.” _I am glad you chose us over your glory._

Then the warm weight is gone, and she leaves the loft.

 _I am sorry I could not save you in time, Tora._ She had been seconds too late to save the shield-maiden from her death by Kjotve’s henchman. Eivor scrunches her eyes tight, tries to remember Tora’s last words to her, her face and her smile, but the memories only swim vaguely and unfeelingly through a murky, dense shroud of anger. Of indifference. She gives an exasperated growl and shakes her head, burying it into the pillow. She should be feeling grief, remorse, tears at her friend’s death, she knows. Not this.

A larger face sharpens in her mind, looms more clearly over it all. _Kjotve._ Like a buzzing, swarming vengeful cloud that enveloped all else. _They will eat you alive, and that is what he wants._ What if Randvi was right, that if Sigurd were here with her, she would not have changed so? Sigurd, or even Vili. They had always understood each other without needing to say a word. Would he have stopped her from going up the mountain to chase glory, or would he have helped her? But Vili wasn’t here either, he was long gone. Only she remained here.

 _Mother and Father. Vili. Sigurd. Tora, and now Randvi._ Gone from her side. Would she drive everyone around her away?

_If it is necessary, then so be it. You have a greater path to follow._

“Shut _up_ ,” she snarls. The thoughts fizzle out a little, but then rear back tenfold like some terrible many-headed serpent snapping free of its chains, drowning out all her doubts, all her hesitancies, smoothing over the cracks in her resolve until nothing was left but a keen, honed edge of vengeance. There was only one thing to think of for now.

_Kjotve. I am coming to kill you._


End file.
